


Falling and Love

by sanura



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Angst, Asexuality Spectrum, But also, Corporeal Sex, Crowley knows more about plants than he's letting on, Cuddling, Cuddling & Snuggling, Excessive Cosmological Metaphors, Excessive Use of Appositive Commas, Excessive Use of Metaphors In General, Excessively Rhapsodic Descriptions of the Passage of Time, Fluff, Handholding, Hedonism, Kissing, Level 5, M/M, Nonbinary Character, Noncorporeal Sex, Other, Professor Lionwheel, Psychological Trauma, Self-Imposed Exposure Therapy, Theological Difficulties, Warlock distracts them from themselves a bit, Wing Grooming, Wing Trauma, also, and it's kind of more important as well, and its consequences, and less about having nice things, and level 5 has math in it, but mostly resolved by fluff, extraplanar sex, guess I went right to, of many types and locations, so so very much cuddling like way more than sex, there is definitely math in some of the sex here so, there's that one post about how there are 5 levels of writing sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-03
Updated: 2019-10-03
Packaged: 2020-11-22 10:43:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 24,331
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20872892
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sanura/pseuds/sanura
Summary: Behold how good,And how pleasant it is,For brethren to dwellTogether in unity.





	Falling and Love

**Author's Note:**

> Immense and eternal thanks to Sana, who betaed for style, flow, and character. Errors remain mine.

Crowley remembered Divine Wrath.  
  
To be sure, he could be messily discorporated a thousand times and suffer the torture of a thousand corresponding delays by sulphurous lake or paperwork for a new way to get the Dodge out of Hell and up into the world, and he still would never forget it. When the all-accepting, all-loving Everything you've ever known tells you No, and casts you out, you remember it. Crowley didn't know where Milton had got his information (or rather, he had his suspicions, but would not pursue the matter with certain adversarial Arrangements in the balance), but Milton had somehow guessed nine1, and he'd been right. Nine days of paralyzed anguish was about what it took to recover enough to even tremble, to begin the long gasp before mourning properly, after the true impact of Divine Wrath on someone—a formerly ethereal, now occult being—who had previously only known Wrath's opposite. Even after a vague saunter.  
  
Nine days doesn't sound like a lot, in terms ethereal or occult. It only took six to set the stage, after all. One to rest, afterward. But Crowley had heard, and, with his absently reifying habit, believed wholeheartedly, that experience made time relative. Not in the objective scientific way he'd accidentally overheard that intriguingly bright young Swiss Hebrew2 in the Bern patent office considering. No, time was relatively, subjectively relative, especially for Crowley, because, look. How long had it been before G– Uh– Anything even moved over the waters, before the firmament was drawn forth, the water separated from the Earth, before the Light was even Let? He had been there, and he didn't have any idea how to collapse that kind of experience onto an axis of time.  
  
Additionally, there were Crowley's six thousand years of near-continuous experience on the face of said Earth, which rested in his memory (with a few exceptions3) the way one's undergraduate career might do when one began a botany postdoc, for example, if one were inclined toward seeking after plant-related knowledge. Wasn't it just last year that one of his favourite professors had retired—no, it'd been ten. Or a few hundred. Or a couple thousand. Where was that nice pâtisserie he'd taken the angel for crêpes suzettes the other day? Oh, it closed decades ago, while he was moving some highway construction survey flags around in a field? Isn't that just the way. Time flies. Relatively.  
  
Or it drags, screeching and burning like the well-Believed tires of a crispy but stylish and undeniably functional automobile—it drags through one's marrow or through one's neurons, and rewrites one's perfect metaphysical multiplanar composition one dimension and one Planck length at a time, each length its own pre-Time eternity, an experiential perpetuity, an utter emotional Absence of even acrimony echoing at every conceivable scale4. It's the absence that gets you. There's wrath, and it's terrible, and the worst thing they can do, after all you've known is grace and omnipresent devotion, is to ignore you. That might be it, actually. The wrath is the withdrawal, the literally5 excruciating oblivion.  
  
The point was, it had hurt.  
  
He didn't know how the humans dealt with it, honestly. He supposed they must not know any better. They hadn't started with the height to make the fall so hard; they didn't have the senses for perceiving that particular kind of warmth-light-pressure, or its absence.  
  
He hadn't lied, when he assured Aziraphale that damnation wasn't so bad, when you got used to it. It was the getting used to it that took some doing. Nine days' worth, to begin with. Divine Wrath was something of a bitch to get over.  
  
All this was to say that Crowley's particular set of worldly and otherworldly experiences made the memory of heavenly love, in a properly contextualised sense, a painful memory.  
  
He'd had a lot of practise playing it off casually to his counterpart when it came up. The blessings and good works were fine, of course; Aziraphale would ask him to fit something in on a business trip and there was nothing to it. People were so malleable. A touch of confidence here, a judicious application of the golden rule to somebody's psyche there, and look how they flourished. Apples in Eden had nothing on people outside it.  
  
It was the harder stuff, the really ethereal business, that brought Crowley up short sometimes with a lungful of brimstone or a harrowing case of galaxy brain. If Aziraphale insisted too reflexively, too emphatically that Crowley was nice, or good, or some other blessed four-letter word, then a reverberation of agony from outside of time might hit Crowley in the obverse inferior plane and run him up against the wall, up against the angel, with a knee-jerk or eye-wheel-jerk or hip-jerk denial, if he couldn't build up a good head of nonchalance first. That kind of virtue was not Crowley, was not for him. Not anymore. And what would his employers say, too?  
  
Sometimes Aziraphale didn't even have to say anything. Crowley would be sitting on a bench with him in St. James, inciting Sloth, or just practising it. He'd get a cramp in his infinite trapezoid and try to work it out by lounging more insolently, but then it'd get worse, or spread to a wheel in a different dimension, or manifest a wing, which could get really inconvenient and require some passive Nothing-To-See-Here miracling that he'd eventually have to account for downstairs, which was a drag. Aziraphale would just inquire politely whether he was all right, dear boy, and continue spraying beatific love all over the park like some kind of stodgy, shabby, empyrean fire hose.  
  
Sometimes it wasn't Aziraphale's fault, to be fair. If he must be fair. Which he mustn't, of course. But the worst reminders had been just before Calvary, with that little girl who was dead and then wasn't, and all the lepers, and Aziraphale hadn't even been there. It was just love and blessed forgiveness all over the place, and it had been very difficult to handle, but Crowley hadn't been able to look away. Or run away. Even though it had hurt, and he'd wanted to.  
  
This was what he was trying, and, he supposed, failing, to explain. Now that they were safe. Now that the world was. Aziraphale didn't really understand. How could he?  
  
The morning slanted into the dusty windows of the bookshop Adam had so thoughtfully, or thoughtlessly, restored. Infinitely energised rays ended their astral journey on Aziraphale, illuminating his shabbily perfect corporation like some kind of Divine presence made human—well. He wasn't that kind of incarnation. He hadn't even been present for that bit, except the end. And Crowley had successfully managed to downplay his involvement until now, until the wine and the relief and the company had loosened his versatile tongue.  
  
Crowley had not meant to philosophise on the topic, nor even really compare scores, since their respective sides were functionally irrelevant at this point. He'd only mentioned that he thought the boy—Destroyer of Kings, Angel of the Bottomless Pit, Great Beast that is called whatever—you know, did a proper job of it, and maybe some other people's sons had to turn over three decades with a good bit of experience and world travel, if Crowley did say so himself, before occasioning a significant if messy turning point in history.  
  
Aziraphale had insisted Crowley explain. Crowley, perhaps inadvisably, retorted with his surprise that the angel didn't know all about it, since it had been his Office's project.  
  
"I was a bit busy at the time, what with the pace of the celestial bureaucracy. I only got back in time to meet you at the hill." Aziraphale didn't often sound regretful. Petulant, yes. Apologetic, sometimes. But not deeply regretful, like it pained him even to admit something. Like a confession of sin, if he'd been capable. Crowley wondered if it was because he'd missed most of the action, or if he'd really wanted to meet the kid, or if he'd wanted to help Crowley in a difficulty. Aziraphale did so like to help, in his way.  
  
"In all honesty," Crowley admitted, voice creaking under the weight of all that unaccustomed honesty, "I think I mostly hung around Emmanu– well, that– that kid, because he reminded me of you. Since, you know, you weren't there to remind me of yourself."  
  
Aziraphale sniffed. By virtue (or sin) of long experience, Crowley could tell it was a flattered but disbelieving sniff.  
  
"As you well know, not every Heaven-originating person is the same. Don't put us all on a pinhead of a pedestal together—"  
  
"Not like that. It wasn't the—hm. Not—no. He was just so annoyingly clever sometimes." Crowley's explanation was not working. Aziraphale appeared to be both incredulous and puzzled at once, which wasn't a great demonstration of his asserted cleverness. Crowley changed tacks. "You remember before the boulder really started rolling on the tomb, back in Gergesa, I was doing that single-soul possession capacity experiment?"  
  
Aziraphale sniffed again. This one was reluctantly amused disapproval.  
  
"Nobody got seriously hurt, really! Not even the Gerasene guy we were occupying. It was just a little cramped in there, and a bit stuffy. I got a whole legion up from Downstairs for the job and we were packed in that guy's spirit together checking the internal dimensions, or the infernal ones, I don't even remember, of a soul—"  
  
"That's not how it works—"  
  
"Well, I know that now, don't I! The blessed kid came along and exorcised all of us at once, and nobody wanted to deal with the red tape for a thousand discorporations, especially out of one body—Dagon would have had a field day with that—so we asked for the possession of the pigs some incompetent swineherd left alone in the next field, and we got them, but nobody from that particular legion had any experience controlling quadrupeds so they all just ran right into the sea and drowned and had to suffer the paperwork anyway. None of that lot's been back since, either." He chewed his lip thoughtfully. "I don't think it was a terribly conclusive experiment."  
  
Aziraphale was trying unsuccessfully to disguise his amusement. His face never was any good at lying. "I had a strange enough time sharing with Madame Tracy, and she has an exceptionally expansive soul. I simply can't imagine being shut in with a full legion. The potential pathic bleed alone..." Aziraphale shuddered fastidiously, then hesitated. "But I haven't ever tried to exorcise you, Crowley. I wouldn't. Even very early on, after we were civil but before we were friends, if we argued, it was just argument."  
  
Crowley supposed that was true. They had never actually, honestly fought. There were wiles, and there were thwarts, but it was just business. The real life was in the conversation and the company.  
  
He looked at Aziraphale's thoughtful, open face, and realised he hadn't finished explaining himself. He wrenched his train6 of thought back to the difficult subject. "Er, did I ever tell you about the time that kid shriveled a whole tree because there weren't any figs on?" Crowley had sometimes wondered in the couple millennia since then whether the tree at the end had got its revenge. In any case, the kid had been right. It had been all leaves, no figs.  
  
"You didn't, no," Aziraphale considered. "I hadn't realised you were there. But I do enjoy those stories. The most significant proportion of my worldly possessions, you know, is a collection of, ah, flawed compilations of similar anecdotes."7 His lips quirked in his most endearingly curious smile. "Would you like to tell me about it?"  
  
It had been a long time ago. Not as long as the source of Crowley's reluctance. It would still be painful. But of all the things they had in common, their interest in knowing these earthly things, in experiencing them, was probably the strongest link. Crowley did want to tell him.  
  
"Well. We were coming back into town from Martha's house, near the end, there." Crowley swallowed, remembering the oppressively dry air and the alternate discomfort and relief of the blessed kid's aura and the warm sun.  
  
Aziraphale leaned towards him, always game for a tale. The light caught in his curls. It hurt, a little. "Was it a long way?"  
  
"No, no, just an hour's walk or so. But there was this tree, you see." There was always a tree, wasn't there? Crowley's hold on his airy tone was slipping. He could feel his coils, hands, his face getting into a trembling disposition. He swallowed again, and smiled. It probably wasn't very good, he thought.  
  
"A special tree?" Aziraphale was hanging on his words perhaps more keenly than they deserved.  
  
"I guess it should have been, but no. It was just a fig tree, hanging about by the road, minding its own business, good leaves, nice trunk. Could have done with a bit of watering, but couldn't we all, in that climate. All right, really. You'd have liked it. But the kid must have been hungry." Or hankering for something to make into an object lesson before being made into one himself, Crowley supposed.  
  
"So, you were walking into town and saw this tree," Aziraphale prompted, smiling himself, emanating goodwill, itching behind all of Crowley's scales and feathers and other unmanifested attributes.  
  
"Yesss," Crowley sighed, steeling himself to the hiss that showed up when he was emotionally overstimulated. "And we got clossser to it, and we sssaw it was just leaves and no fruit, and the kid went bananasss– or, well," Crowley silently berated his usually flexible and obedient tongue, "He went figs, I suppose, and yelled, a really petulant tirade, the way you get tetchy if the Bordeaux season has failed and I've been really abysmal and forgotten to nudge the cellars for you."  
  
"Indeed," the angel tittered. "I've been known to go figs in such circumstances."  
  
"Yeah," said Crowley, again clearing his oddly clogged throat. The pause was slightly too long. "So when we came back the next day, the tree was—it was dead," he managed.  
  
"I see," said Aziraphale. Did he?  
  
Crowley had held the odd mallard underwater. Aziraphale had banished the odd aggressive real estate enquirer from his shop, never to be seen again. Idle mischief and the alleviation of inconvenience were such human actions. What wonderful results they had borne, and what atrocities.8  
  
Crowley waved a hand awkwardly in Aziraphale's slightly, annoyingly, luminous vicinity. "He made all this fuss about how one can get anything if one asks properly for it, of course, just as you always do. The same fuss you always make. Ineffable." He rolled his eyes. And his eye-wheels, outside of time.  
  
Aziraphale, in a fairly surprising display of physical dexterity, caught his hand. "A common pretext," he beamed. The warmth from his hand should have burned, maybe, but it was soothing, and Crowley's scales smoothed, and his intemperate planar whirling slowed.  
  
"I think it was just a bit cross," Crowley grumped, and then realised what he'd said.  
  
Aziraphale burst out laughing.  
  
"We can hardly criticise constructively at this late date, now, can we?" The angel's eyes were shining with something. He was squeezing Crowley's hand, but it felt like a release of pressure.  
  
"Sure I can," Crowley retorted. "Not only was it April—figs are ready in August at the earliest, you know—it was April, and that tree was a pollinator, not a fruiter!"  
  
"You're not a fruiter," Aziraphale muttered delightedly, now holding Crowley's hand with both of his own. Tightly. It was both reassuring and insufferable.  
  
"I mean, I've been known to make the occasional unreasonable demand of a plant, here and there," Crowley admitted, thinking perhaps now he knew where that habit had originated, before the plant-conversation craze of the seventies. Then he rethought that thought, since that particular kind of ancient influence would certainly not be approved by his employers. If he was still employed. "I do try and keep my demands at least slightly realistic, though," he snorted. "A waste of a miracle, that was, and a waste of a perfectly good tree."  
  
"Blasphemy is so passé these days, dear boy," Aziraphale pouted, tapping Crowley on the thumb. "And I should think that was rather the point! Realism is for those of us who haven't got Ineffability to maintain." His hand went back to gently containing Crowley's.  
  
"Anyway, it reminded me of you." Crowley felt calmer for having told the story. Or, he thought that was what had done the calming. Maybe it was the corporeal sensation from Aziraphale's hand. They hadn't really done much of this. Shaking hands, sure. They'd shaken on the agreement to stop the end of the world. Hand-holding, though; that was fairly new. Crowley shivered.  
  
Aziraphale was suddenly solemn. It didn't suit him. The happy wrinkles on either side of his mouth lowered, and he pursed his lips thoughtfully. "I'm sorry I wasn't there," he said.  
  
"I know," Crowley huffed.  
  
"No, I don't think you do," Aziraphale grimaced. "I mean, yes, I showed up at the hill and told you He'd said to be kind when you asked what He'd done, but that was secondhand. That was what I'd heard from His mother."  
  
"A sweet lady," Crowley admitted.  
  
"Yes, very. But my point is, I wasn't there with you when you were thrown out into a pig, or I would have done something. I wasn't there when your poor tree was damned, or I would have said something. You showed Him all the kingdoms of the world, you said. Why wasn't I there? I wasn't there when you wandered off before the end, or I would have come with you. I should have been there, and I wasn't, and I almost wasn't for the apocalypse, and I never want to—to not be there for you, ever again."  
  
Crowley slid, somewhat more liquidly than usually recommended for a human shape, from his seat on the threadbare tartan sofa to a puddle of demonic weariness on the threadbare (thankfully not tartan, but still distressingly beige) carpet.  
  
"I'm used to it," he said, and then regretted it.  
  
The silence was immediately painful. Aziraphale had followed him solicitously to the rug, and now the pressure of his hands around Crowley's was nearly burning—ow. What? Crowley's hand was definitely burning. He extricated it from Aziraphale's and shook it off, then startled to see a couple droplets flung into the air. Unbelievable. How did a measure of holy water, even a tiny one that was only slightly holy, get on Crowley's hand?  
  
Oh. Aziraphale was crying.  
  
"Oh, Go– S– bugger it, don't cry," Crowley pleaded. "It's not your fault I'm used to being left alone. That's how I like it," he tried.  
  
Aziraphale wasn't buying it, and sniffed a further dilution of holy water into an antique handkerchief he'd clearly miracled out of a closet that contained an improbable amount of both dust and starch. "Of course you like it, my dear. That's why you spend all your free time chasing away my customers for me and drinking my wine and bullying me into dinners out or long walks in the park or long nights in, listening to music. Heavens, I imagine you so love to be left alone that you have incessant conversations with your houseplants because no one thought to drop in on you for the company."  
  
"It'sss—ugh, Angel, it's how things are. I've got to wile to get the thwart, and you've got no reason to thwart if I haven't wiled something up—"  
  
"I'm not talking about work!" Aziraphale was desperately unhappy now, and Crowley was getting there.  
  
"I don't blame you for keeping to the responsible edges of this friendship, Aziraphale! There was a lot more at stake for you than for me." Crowley rearranged the tangle of his legs on the floor and peered up into the angel's overwrought face, keeping clear of any further drips.  
  
"Why did it take me so long to admit it? That's not friendship, it's taking advantage." Aziraphale had worked himself into an actual wail. He was wailing. Like a siren in doppler retreat, or a toddler in the middle of teething, or a klaxon on the approach of the Luftwaffe. It was very irritating, not least because Aziraphale hadn't actually done anything wrong and Crowley didn't know how to make him stop suffering.  
  
"I'm a bad angel, and a bad friend. I let you do all the work for six thousand years and then pretended it didn't matter, just because I was scared to get in trouble. I gave you nothing back. You're so much better than you know." Crowley could tell he really thought that. His brow was crumpled disconsolately, and his mouth, usually so mobile and pointed, was pressed thin to disguise its trembling. He couldn't meet Crowley's eyes.  
  
But then he did. "You're a demon, and you've been doing better angelic work than I have for at least half the Arrangement—" Crowley made a grossly inarticulate mouth-noise of protest and looked away, but Aziraphale scrubbed both hands on his wilted handkerchief and then caught Crowley's hand again, tugging at it insistently. "—And even if you hadn't, you're my best friend and you don't deserve to be left alone." Crowley could tell he believed that too, despite the fact that it appeared to be actual blasphemy, passé or not.  
  
Aziraphale's eyes twitched away from Crowley's, and he realised he wasn't wearing his sunglasses. Then they twitched back. It looked very difficult for him. Crowley supposed it was a difficult sight. "I won't do it again," Aziraphale said thickly.  
  
Crowley looked down at his captured hand, and then back into the angel's distressingly damp face, feeling he had somewhat lost the thread. "What?"  
  
Aziraphale's chin quivered in an affect of countenance Crowley had previously only seen on silent-movie starlets in close-up. "I won't leave you alone again. I'll do it right."  
  
Crowley thought perhaps angelic chin quivers might be contagious. He could feel his brows drawing together in their own crumple, and made a series of vaguely interrogative noises.  
  
"I've let you down so, Crowley! I've wasted so much time! I can't believe I let the bureaucracy stop me. I know we haven't exactly been professionally on top of things, but it pains me so, to think how I've let our own side down!"  
  
Crowley drew a long breath, and turned his face back up to Aziraphale's. It was all trembling, now. Or maybe it was just Crowley's eyes. "Our side?"  
  
"Yes. Ours. Like you said. I'm afraid I have got to apologise again, for denying you then. It must have been my incompetence running over into fields where it's not welcome, when it's so much more than any job to be here for you, for us, to show love instead of just feeling it."  
  
Aziraphale's outburst had the unrehearsed and alarmed tone of someone who has gone off script and has no way to improvise back to the acceptable outcome. He was staring tearfully at the ugly, ugly carpet. Crowley, bent unrealistically low so he could look up into Aziraphale's eyes, stared at him.  
  
"You feel it?" Crowley asked, just as hesitantly, just as irrevocably.  
  
"Of course I do! You're unmistakable, my dear." Aziraphale snorted indelicately through his tears.  
  
Crowley leaned slowly backwards, collapsing from his twisted posture of supplication into an even less plausible knot of confusion on a carpet that was suddenly a tasteful geometric pattern of deep red on black.  
  
Aziraphale rallied. "But I was talking about the—the feelings _I_ have, that I've been so inexcusably—and for so long—squashing into plausible deniability. And for what? You mean so much to me, and I'm supposed to be good at this. How could I leave it so badly wrong? I'm so glad that we were there together at the end of days, and now there are—more days, and I'm so glad it's given me a chance to—to love you. Properly."  
  
Crowley's internal twisting confusion was reflected in his serpentine deportment. "Ah, but I'm properly unLove-able. Well proven, thoroughly demonstrated."  
  
Despite his expertise in moral philosophy, Crowley had more of a practical approach to his job than a philosophical one. However, he was pretty sure the idea was that once you were disqualified from the universal, comprehensive package of Divine Love, then receipt of other meaningful specific love was pretty much out of the question. Liking, well. That was another matter. He liked a lot of things, and could be well enough liked if he wanted. _I don't even like you_, Aziraphale had said, frowning forlornly in the bandstand, and Crowley hadn't hesitated to correct him.  
  
"But I do love you, Crowley." Aziraphale squinted blearily into Crowley's yellow eyes, apparently searching for something, and needing to shut out some of the light to be able to see it. Crowley knew the feeling. All his sunglasses were in the car.  
  
"Properly. Of course you do, Angel. You have to. It's how you're made." Crowley was aware there was a contradiction he'd just posited, but the way to reconcile it kept skipping sideways off his mind. Like something off a duck. His spine was so intensely insouciant it bordered on nonexistent. He adjusted it, aiming for more of an offhand nonchalance and less of an eldritch grotesquerie.  
  
"Not proper– No– I've got to stop making excuses, and so have you. It's not because I'm supposed to, or because I'm good. I don't even know if I am; you were right at the beginning—you've been right the whole time." Aziraphale's face was unbearably open, even when not pointed directly at him. This frontal assault, while Crowley lay an untidy, snarled skein on the stupid carpet, was a nearly blinding attack of unmistakable revelations. "What if you did the good thing, and I did the bad thing? After the end of the world—that's all it took—I've grown up, grown along, grown human enough to admit that I make mistakes. Whether or not it's the good thing, I do—I do."  
  
The angel was still looking at him, willing him to know something. "Of course you can feel it. I should never have said that, in Tadfield, when you were asking about–" Aziraphale stuttered to a stop. There was a desperation and a plea in his dumb, irrepressible face, and in his aura, which both emanated so overpoweringly that Crowley wouldn't be surprised if people for blocks around offered each other things without realizing why.  
  
Crowley considered, running the numbers on the moral philosophy to distract himself from the uncomfortable disarray of emotions pouring off the angel. "I don't think you've done a bad thing, Aziraphale." He never did the bad thing. He sometimes wanted to, but he never went through with it; Crowley was usually there to put things in perspective. That was the difficult thing, here. Crowley had a fairly immovable perspective on this subject.  
  
It might help his case that it was blasphemy to love Crowley, actually. "Or if you have," he qualified, hedging for his life, "It's a good kind of bad thing." He stopped, again, to swallow. "Like—like mine, maybe?" A good kind of bad thing. They existed. He was an expert. Someone had to flail off the edge to find the distance. Do the experiment to get the evidence. That was the first precept of learning. The Fall of Man was his résumé's biggest item, but look how far they had come with it.  
  
Aziraphale had his eyebrows raised together in that way that made you sure that what he wanted was best for everyone and if only he got it the world would be right and all things comfortable, and if he didn't, more hearts would break than just his. Crowley thought maybe in this instance it might be true.  
  
"Or Adam's." Adam's good kind of bad thing was another step out of one kind of Light into the darkness of doubt, out of the darkness of ignorance into another kind of illumination. Either Adam. There was enough choosing your own side, after tiring of being dictated to by an authority, going about unpunished these days. Choosing Crowley, even if his own choice had most definitely been punished, might not hurt anybody else. And it would be different enough from divine love that it might not hurt him so much.  
  
"Just—let me." Aziraphale blotted his eyes, irritably miracled his handkerchief dry, and set a hand on Crowley's somewhat implausibly located shoulder.  
  
"Let you what?" Crowley resigned himself to the hard-earned knowledge that he would let Aziraphale do anything.  
  
"Well. Let me. Show you." Aziraphale's whole hope-ridden, worry-crumpled visage was shimmering, now. His whole self. Was he glowing brighter? Or had the sun come out from behind a cloud and speared him down through the windows? Crowley was slightly alarmed.  
  
"Show me what?" With his luck, it would be a sleight-of-hand trick.  
  
It was not.  
  
Crowley stared, with more eyes than just his body's. Aziraphale, in his comfortable, accustomed corporation, was steadily shining like an imperial ton of impassioned molten gold in a lidless crucible. At the same time, he was a burgeoning, undulating mass of affectionately playful holographic glitter, the really expensive kind that flicked through the whole rainbow, even infrared, in every speck. He was an entire world full of oceans all viewed at once from exactly the right angle to be reflecting the wavelet-broken sunset directly into Crowley's vision9, and each facet of golden light was so fervently earnest that it was nearly as embarrassing as watching the angel accept a gift he'd been trying to pretend was a favour.  
  
"Do you see, Crowley?" It was still Aziraphale, coruscating unbearably through his hands folded over the place on his waistcoat where age and tireless affection had worn the nap to nothing. Crowley felt like that piece of balding velveteen, his protective covering gone with constant use. Or like Aziraphale's eyes, glimmering both to the natural sight and the supernatural. Crowley was going to drip just like that with devastating responsive vehemence and be uncontainable in a moment, if he didn't manage to stuff it all into some words here and convey it more neatly to Aziraphale.  
  
"I. See." said Crowley, directly into the carpet.  
  
Aziraphale moved to pull at Crowley's shoulder, gathering him up with both hands and shining at him so inescapably that Crowley's eyes did actually water and he had to squinch his whole face to make them shut.  
  
"Don't be afraid," Aziraphale said outrageously.  
  
Crowley scoffed his most derisive scoff, which admittedly had less of an impact when his tight-squinted eyes were streaming and his hands were shaking as he found himself winding them around Aziraphale's antique waistcoat. "Has that _ever_ worked, in the history of your career as an angelic messenger? Or anyone else's?"  
  
"I'm hoping it will work this time. What do you think?" The formless scintillation behind Aziraphale's appearance was suddenly, obviously, partly fearful. It was afraid. Aziraphale was afraid.  
  
Crowley could not be having with that.  
  
With a mild incredulity, he watched himself decide not to hide, not to be afraid himself. Heaven– indeed, yes, Heaven help him. Well, he had always been long enough on spine.  
  
"Have I ever been afraid of you? In six thousand years? You had a flaming sword the first time I saw you, you know. Maybe not as shiny as whatever's going on here, but–"  
  
The brightness expanded, and consumed him. It did not hurt.  
  
*  
  
  
They were not in the shop. It was not really a place, as the concept is generally understood by most of the beings by whom the Earth is populated. It wasn't a location plottable on a Cartesian plane or a polar coordinate system, or any combination thereof, or even a Schwarzchild chart, or a Riemannian manifold; it was not a location at all. Crowley, as a part of Creation, could only perceive things in a linear sequential manner, but it wasn't really in Time either.  
  
So the obnoxiously assured incandescence coming off of Aziraphale was also not of a physical location outside Crowley, or indeed Aziraphale. They were both nowhere and everywhere, and there was only the two of them, and they were together.  
  
Aziraphale agreed.  
  
Crowley suspected the vehement and steady resoluteness suffusing him was not in fact his own.  
  
Aziraphale supportively affirmed that it could be. Certainty was available, if he'd only open to it.  
  
Crowley cracked, emotionally, into the press of the surety. He felt, as the kids were putting it these days, _seen_. The crevices multiplied and the light got in, and it wasn't that the light was painful, it was that things were opening, and they had not been open since he was new. Nothing was wrong; that was excessively clear. But it was different, and adhesive layers, having grown inadvisedly over things that should have been unimpeded, were splintering. He somehow managed to feel raw and burnt at once.  
  
Not by the light. That was there, warm as the sands outside the garden, showing all the scratches and divots and reinforced fissures in his psyche to him in multispectral Technicolor. But it wasn't the light pulling at the raveled ends of him. It had its own soppy interstices to bake dry and corners it reflected around that would be better directly traversed; he could tell that from here, in this strange nowhere. No, the light wasn't hurting him. He was doing that himself.  
  
It was real, though, the pain. And it was a lot. He'd know. This wasn't the beach-sand sting you could hotfoot over indefinitely. It would take a long time to get all of this ill-fitting callus off, to moult this stricture properly, but there were reasons it was there. He couldn't just pull all the stops and open himself and take off his stays, or he'd collapse, he'd melt. He might even scorch, though it wasn't a harming light. He was fairly fireproof, but it was better to advance these kinds of vulnerabilities incrementally. At least the brilliance made things unambiguous, and he was colourfast in the face of it and wouldn't fade.  
  
But it was exhausting, this renewal, and he had broken all his defenses against the prickly truth of the matter: he was shining, too. A devil _may_ care. There was a different constant for his radiation and maybe nobody in the world could see it, but there certainly was a lot of it. And they weren't in the world. Aziraphale had more practise at withstanding brightness and reflecting it, but for all he was designed to love, there hadn't been a lot of opportunity in their reality for him to accept it. And, technically, Crowley was designed for it, too.  
  
So the cricks and crannies letting the actual, perceptible, feelable feelings into Crowley's most defensible core warmed from both sides, which were not really sides. He felt the slow-expanding curl of what must be a million stifled smiles transfusing into unstiflement. A few hundred generations of enchanted guffaws that had been hastily smothered to captious eye-rolls slithered back into the groove they had meant to inhabit, and Aziraphale found them there, and beamed.  
  
It was an accelerating cascade, now that Crowley had the hang of it. Tangents away from his actual intentions, obscuring mechanisms in case of rejection—well, there were good reasons he had learnt them, but it was going to be a big help to be able to see through them, now he knew they were there. Aziraphale warmed and lit, fascinated and unjudgmental.  
  
Crowley opened the windows between the bits of himself that might be better together, and felt them, one at a time. He kneaded the stiff, cupped and blew gently on the chilled, blanketed the overstimulated. The certainty was spreading. This might be okay. Something tiny and sharp and endless that had been screaming since he broke it in the Fall was comforted, and lay quiet, and began to heal.  
  
*  
  
He woke, bemused, in the plane he'd pulled close while stopping the apocalypse clock to give Adam time to consider his options. This time, it was only himself and Aziraphale in the trackless desert. It felt physical, and he supposed it was, in a different manner than the world; the light here hurt his eyes and Aziraphale's fob and buttons scraped the back of his head where it lay in Aziraphale's slightly collapsed lap. Crowley's feathers were doubtless disarranged under his back where his wings were folded.  
  
Aziraphale was stroking his hair, definitely messing it up, and occasionally detouring to wipe the still-trickling tears from his cheeks. There was an ungraciously smug, but unmissably fond, smile on his upside-down face. It widened as he saw Crowley's eyes open. He mantled over Crowley and put a bit of shade over his eyes. It was a surprising relief.  
  
"You're sure you're not afraid?" Aziraphale didn't actually seem worried now.  
  
"Not of you." Crowley's sneer didn't really work.  
  
Aziraphale's complacency evaporated immediately. "Oh, my dear. There really is nothing to fear."  
  
"That doesn't always matter," Crowley admitted.  
  
The thought seemed to percolate slowly but irrevocably through Aziraphale's clever, clever mind, and the repercussions propagated and accumulated visibly on his face. His hands stilled. "Can I do anything to help?" Aziraphale's worried-hopeful eyebrows were back together.  
  
"You always do." Crowley really hadn't meant to say that where Aziraphale could hear. He raised his eyes to the silver lining ruffling the edge of the white wing covering the burning sun.  
  
"I didn't mean to Fall," Crowley said, and knew someone believed him. Someone had stood next to him and explained uncomfortably that yes, the kids would drown. Someone had tried to tell the hardasses that there didn't need to be a war, but been punished for trying to prevent it because that meant no one would win. The rules, the lines are slippery, and it's not hard to cross them without meaning to.  
  
Aziraphale drew a long, shuddering breath, which was typically melodramatic of him, since Crowley was the one who had just been crying after fainting them both into a whole other plane of existence. "Let's get back to the world, and I'll get us a nice cup of tea, and I'll try to help on purpose this time."  
  
"Are you going to glow at me again?" Crowley's words kept escaping him. Was he drunk?  
  
"I can't really help it, but I'll keep the shades over it until you're ready to take them off." He was so patronising. It was unconscionable.  
  
Crowley rolled his shadeless eyes. Aziraphale gave him an encouraging smile.  
  
They went home.  
  
*  
  
The carpet at the foot of Aziraphale's couch was as good a place as any to make the brave stand. It had witnessed their drunken expostulations at the end of the world, and it knew their mettle. Their strength was not inexhaustible. Their stamina and unswerving loyalty were not their greatest advantage. They were open to changing their minds, and open to ideas they hadn't thought of, and they considered things carefully. Sometimes.  
  
So when Crowley returned from outer planes plastered tragedically to Aziraphale's lap, clutching him about the waist as a fainting heroine (which was a category to which he suspected he technically could be considered to belong) might do, he took a moment for the traditional hesitation.  
  
It was definitely difficult to still the ever-whirling patterns that kept track of Hell's projects and objectives, the locations and calendars of its accountability, the conventions and constrictions of behavior or the appearance of behavior, the ever-abrasive scuffle Not to Be in Trouble. Crowley tried harder to be easy in his body, in his place, but he suspected, as he found himself squeezing Aziraphale more firmly than perhaps he ought, that being easy was not a task best accomplished by trying hard.  
  
Hesitation achieved, Crowley felt his eyes burning, the acid of doubt in his throat, the endless fatigue of trying, and then thought of the windows in himself. The glow got in when they were open. He held on to the thought and Azraphale, and felt him breathe, and just... went with it. The world had ended, and they were still there. It was only Aziraphale. It was _Aziraphale_. It was time to give the Hell in.  
  
Crowley folded his face up into the velveteen-clad ribcage before him, shuddered, and shed the weight of resisting his impulses. He sighed into Aziraphale's watch pocket, clung tighter, and _nuzzled_ him.  
  
Aziraphale didn't seem to hesitate at all, but Crowley supposed he'd got it all over with in the entire course of history.  
  
Soft, sweet hands settled in Crowley's hair and brushed comfortingly over his back. He'd thought it would be difficult to take, some kind of overwhelming perceptual richness that might short him out if he didn't pay attention in exactly the right way and mediate the experience himself—the unendurable shining had primed him for a struggle after this kind of giving in.  
  
But of all things, it was _easy_ to let the touches land and to bask in their lavish affection. Aziraphale's gaze was nearly impossible to withstand, but his embrace, his care, was fitted perfectly for Crowley to receive. He kept his ear to Aziraphale's belly and fit the murmur there to its function. It was like listening to the sun. Which he had done, occasionally, long ago. All these little displacements and autonomous reactions just ticked along (at least, Crowley thought Aziraphale wasn't consciously running his own stomach; it didn't seem like the kind of thing he would do). It was a hum and gurgle of rightness, which the properly experienced could clock.  
  
Crowley settled into the weird music and pushed further at Aziraphale, leaning him back up against the leg of the couch. Aziraphale took the push, gathering Crowley up closer to him as he went. Crowley nudged the coffee table away from their bit of floor with his heel and spread out and scooted up, his ear now over Aziraphale's heart. Aziraphale kissed him on the crown.  
  
"Mmh," said Crowley.  
  
"Just so," Aziraphale preened, and kept stroking his back, and craned around to kiss the tip of his ear.  
  
It was a little bit tickly, but the solidity of the body he was clinging to, and the firm sweep of Aziraphale's hands over his back, kept it from being too much.  
  
"Whiwrdonthbsss?" Crowley was melting, but it was good.  
  
"What was that, dear?"  
  
Crowley turned his face so that it wasn't squashed into Aziraphale's shirtfront. "Why did we ever do anything but this?"  
  
"Well, we did have somewhat preoccupying jobs until very recently." Aziraphale paused. "And there are other things we've done, or that we could do, that are worthwhile, surely."  
  
"I mostly spent Ritz dinners watching you enjoy them, to be honest."  
  
"I know. I tried to make sure you knew how much I did enjoy them."  
  
"I'm shocked, Angel. Exhibitionism?"  
  
"Only to you." Aziraphale resumed running his elegant fingers over Crowley, a whole new set of sensations blooming now that Crowley's face was available for the touching.  
  
"Oh, believe me, the whole establishment knew how good that Gateaux St. Honoré was." Crowley would have sniggered, but it would have disturbed the trace of Aziraphale's fingers over his cheekbones.  
  
"It was very good, but it wouldn't have been the same without your company." Aziraphale was too serene.  
  
"I can be very good company, I'm sure. Improves most experiences," Crowley insinuated.  
  
"Precisely." Aziraphale didn't even blush.  
  
"To be fair, though, we both of us kept most of our experiences in the realm of plausible deniability."  
  
"I'm so glad that's done with."  
  
Crowley's eyebrows went as high as they would go, and he disengaged enough to sit up slightly and look Aziraphale in the eye. "Oh?"  
  
Aziraphale took his face in both hands. "I think we've probably scared our respective offices off our trail well enough that we can accomplish things other than eating, drinking, and taking in shows together."  
  
Crowley was still melted, and Aziraphale's thumbs outlining his jaw weren't helping. "Like hugs? And pats? They're very good."  
  
Aziraphale smiled that coy and grateful smile he smiled when Crowley had done something right. "Like hugs and pats. And anything else you'd enjoy." He tilted his head. "And maybe on a surface slightly more forgiving than rug on hardwood."  
  
Crowley meant to snort, but he had closed his eyes and leaned into Aziraphale's hands. "Don't think all the surfaces are going to go forgiving me just because you have," he tried.  
  
Aziraphale rolled his eyes. Crowley could tell, even with his own eyes closed. "All my surfaces certainly will. Just let's come up here on the couch." He jiggled Crowley's shoulder with his own, and then they were on the couch. "Heave ho," he said.  
  
Crowley slithered (oh, ha) against him, and then diffused back into a more horizontal sprawl, this time almost entirely distributed over Aziraphale's own surfaces instead of his shop's. They were very nice surfaces, and Crowley appreciated them. It was definitely an improvement.  
  
Aziraphale tugged him up his front until Crowley's temple lay just over Aziraphale's lapel, and then he resumed the restful motion of his hands over Crowley's skin. It was like a tactile version of the glowing, but it wasn't so overwhelming. Crowley almost wanted to sleep, but he finally had a good hold of Aziraphale, and vice versa, and didn't want to miss any of it.  
  
"You can glow a bit, if you need to," Crowley offered magnanimously.  
  
"Oh, I am. I don't really stop, you know. But you don't have to look, if it's too much."  
  
"I'll get used to it, now that I know it's there." Crowley closed his eyes, and squinted with some other vision, and there it was, illuminating the whole place. He'd always thought he could find Aziraphale blind.  
  
"I'm happy to do something a little more productive than just glowing." Aziraphale turned Crowley's collar over and smoothed it down, then wrapped one arm over his shoulders and squished him gently.  
  
"You're plenty productive. You even did your taxes last week. Take the afternoon." Crowley yawned into Aziraphale's neck. "I think we can afford it. Hey, aren't we unemployed anyway?"  
  
Aziraphale grunted. "It's a moot question, and I suspect it will remain so for some time. I won't open the shop today anyway, you silly thing. I'm occupied."  
  
"Oh, literally. Very good. I'm not ceding this ground today, that's true." Crowley consciously relaxed his hold. It was very nice. He stretched his neck and took some long breaths full of new cologne and Woolite and a special safe kind of Divine Grace and skin oil, and felt more of his anxious wheels unwinding.  
  
"Stay right here, as long as you like. Though I wouldn't say no to a nice tea if you get peckish in the next few hours. But you needn't cede any ground for it. We could order in."  
  
"Phone's in my jacket pocket. You can call them yourself."  
  
"No hurry. As occupied territory, though, I might request a reprieve from the siege that telephone's laying to my ribs. It's rather pointy, if you don't get the flat side." His suspicion of the entire institution of cellular telephony was audible in his tone.  
  
"Hmn." Crowley spontaneously removed the jacket, with the phone in it, to the coffee table. It draped casually over the facsimile of the Lindisfarne Gospels Aziraphale had been poring over earlier in the day, before he had inquired after the contemporary Gospel of Crowley and subsequently unleashed a full-on cataract of love, into the onslaught of which Crowley was still trying to settle. He decided it might feel a bit more natural without the jacket.  
  
"Oh, thank you, my dear." Aziraphale wiggled. It was very interesting. "You needn't keep the waistcoat either, if you'd be more comfortable."  
  
"I see how it is. Can't wait to get me out of my kit, eh, Angel?" Crowley snorted lazily into Aziraphale's own unmodified high collar.  
  
"To be quite honest, though of course I can wait, I must say I am rather looking forward to it. If it's on offer."  
  
Crowley could feel his brow wrinkling and lifted his head to stare incredulously at Aziraphale. "Are you serious?"  
  
Aziraphale was looking carefully straight forward, not meeting Crowley's eyes, and now his heart, Crowley could feel where it lay under his shoulder, was beating somewhat faster. "Only if it's something you're interested in. I wouldn't dream of asking if you'd rather not."  
  
"We've just been messing about directly in each other's psyches and playing formless in the fields between the electrons. I hardly think baring corporations to each other is going to be much of a nakedness in comparison." Crowley shook his head quizzically.  
  
"No, of course not, but it's– It's something." Aziraphale had reached the end of his ability to be direct.  
  
"By all accounts, yes, especially in these latterly times, having a waistcoat off is really something to behold." Crowley set himself up on his elbows, either side of Aziraphale's chest, and did away with both their waistcoats. He greatly anticipated Aziraphale's response, watching his expression intently.  
  
A slow, besotted smile dawned gradually over Aziraphale's face. "My!" he blurted, clearly confounded by his luck.  
  
Crowley sniggered. "Yes, your."10  
  
They breathed together, soft, unobstructed abdomen to pliant underbelly, and Crowley thought this was definitely something. Aziraphale took a deeper lungful he didn't really need, raising Crowley slightly. A novel and very human sensation. Crowley could almost feel Aziraphale's feelings for him, so much was in the movement of his breath against Crowley.  
  
Aziraphale swallowed. "Are you– would you like to stay like this? I don't–"  
  
"It's just clothes. Doesn't matter to me one way or another." Crowley was honestly amazed, and amused, at how Englishly the angel had managed to assimilate. They'd shared the baths in Aquae Sulis without a qualm, and in Nemea before that, and in Mohenjo Daro before that, but Aziraphale was fully acculturated now.  
  
"It's not the clothes that matter, Crowley. It's you." On anyone less intelligent-looking, Crowley would have called this a stupid grin.  
  
"What, and I never mattered before?"  
  
Aziraphale took him by the elbows, the lovely soppy smile sliding off his face and creasing into a disconcerting but familiar earnestness. "You have always mattered, my dear, since before I knew your name, and the clothes have nothing to do with it. However, as you say, we have just been messing about in each other's psyches and you did just rejoin your corporation after a fairly strenuous emotional phenomenon, which I believe I precipitated myself, and I want to make sure you won't be... disturbed... if I ever manage to, to let go of some of the same inhibitions it seems to have shaken out of you."  
  
"You'd never disturb me, Aziraphale." Crowley set his chin down on Aziraphale's collarbone, then thought better of it and rested his cheek there instead.  
  
"Crowley," Aziraphale said over his head with very careful, very fragile confidence, "we both know what Never really means."  
  
"Yes. We do." Crowley wasn't sure how the whimsy he'd developed had gone so portentous, but he was game. "I d–"  
  
There was an absolute furor of knocking and muffled shouting at the door of the shop.  
  
Crowley and Aziraphale both froze, piled upon each other as they were, and pretended rather effectively not to be in. Aziraphale didn't even shout that he was closed.  
  
It appeared, after the first panic cleared, that only one person was instigating this tumult, and a rather small one at that. The knocks were all from just above the doorknob, and the voice was high. In fact, it was a child's voice, and familiar–  
  
The bodily tangle on the couch was precipitously relocated to the floor as they both recognised who was yelling into the letterbox. They looked at each other in consternation, and were just as precipitously untangled.  
  
Crowley was still cross-legged on the rug resettling the neckline of his shirt when he realised Aziraphale was actually going to answer the door.  
  
"Aziraphale!" he hissed, and stood. "What are you doing?"  
  
"I'm letting him in!" Aziraphale used all of the considerable effrontery at his disposal.  
  
"But what are we going to tell him?"  
  
"Let's just see what he wants!"  
  
Aziraphale opened the door.  
  
"–father will put you out of business!" The impassioned young postulant fell over the threshold.  
  
Crowley drew himself up into perfectly strict lines. Aziraphale beat him to the punch.11  
  
"Exactly what is the matter, young master Dowling?" He didn't fall all the way back into his excessive West Country cadence, but he did speak differently when confronted with a familiar child in an unexpected context.  
  
"You're... you're here." Warlock apparently hadn't anticipated they'd answer the door. "It's you."  
  
"Yes, yes, it's us. What about you? What are you doing here?" Crowley would deny, if accused, that he was blustering.  
  
"How did you even find us?" Aziraphale thought for a moment, then turned to Crowley, still visibly puzzled. "How did he find us?"  
  
Warlock heaved the kind of gusty sigh that only an extremely put-upon preteen can manage unironically. "The Amazing Mr. Fell and his Remarkable Feats of Prestidigitation? Who looks just like the gardener who was always teaching me manners, only with smaller teeth? Come on. My father's tax lady says your tax records are immaculate, and this is the only address listed for either business."  
  
Aziraphale looked at Crowley, somewhat abashed. "Ah, yes. I do like to keep the records correctly–"  
  
"You keep them so correctly that you've been investigated three times for fraud because Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs assume you must be getting away with something." Crowley crossed his arms.  
  
"I told my father– and of course you're here too, Nanny. I was just looking for a clue from Mr. Fell, or Brother Francis, I guess, but I should have known you'd be together." Warlock blew the ends of his fringe out of his eyes. Someone had cut it since they'd seen him last.  
  
Aziraphale was still perturbed. "I would have thought Adam would put everything back as it was, and he didn't recognise us at the party–"  
  
"I don't know who Adam is, but I only realised a couple days ago that Brother Francis and Nanny Ashtoreth went and turned into a rubbish magician and lame waiter–"  
  
"Hey!"  
  
"–for my eleventh birthday party, and I wanted to know where they went! And why! And so does my father!" This last was something of an afterthought, and might have been added only for clout. Warlock tossed his hair sideways.  
  
"I guess Adam put more things back than we might have thought to in his place," Crowley said under his breath to Aziraphale.  
  
"Who is Adam? And how did you disappear? My father will..." Warlock was radiating an aura even more upset than he seemed, which was very upset indeed.  
  
Crowley sighed through his nose, and uncrossed his arms. "Young man, I'm perfectly sure your father has no idea you're here, and I doubt your mother does either. Who's in the car? Apurva? Donovan?"  
  
Warlock didn't answer. He appeared to be controlling his breathing with great care.  
  
"You're not here by yourself?" Crowley frowned sulphurously.  
  
"Dad fired Apurva last Christmas. I can use the Tube." Warlock's tempestuous flair had buckled somewhat upon actually finding what he was looking for.  
  
Crowley shook his head. "Yes, but in the absence of the unfurling powers of Hell to keep you safe, you've got to be careful–"  
  
"I don't need that! I don't need to bend legions to my cruelest whim! I can use trains! Where did you go?"  
  
"We had to take care of some important things," Aziraphale started.  
  
"I'm the most important! My father is the ambassador!" Warlock stomped on the hardwood.  
  
"You are important, Warlock, but that has nothing to do with your father, and you are growing up." Crowley stepped toward Warlock, spreading his hands. "You didn't need us anymore."  
  
"Yeah, but who just disappears into nothing after so long without even warning me– my father?"  
  
Crowley considered this complaint carefully, and had no good answer. "I'm sorry," he said.  
  
"You've found us here, though," Aziraphale offered. "Would you like some tea? I believe I have some chocolate digestives in the back, somewhere," he bustled cannily away from the agitated child.  
  
"Those are the worst," Warlock pouted, and regained some composure.  
  
"Oh, they're all right," said Crowley, "He likes them, so he's offering them to you. It's his way of apologising."  
  
Warlock flipped his hair out of his eyes again, and faced Crowley. "I know you're spies or something–"  
  
"Now, why would you assume something like that?" It took most of Crowley's acting experience not to emanate smugness, so pleased was he at the idea that someone had assumed he was a spy.  
  
"I remember from when I was little. You were always telling me different things and I never saw you talk to my parents, but you were always there, arranging things, and then you were gone. And you didn't come back."  
  
This was not so pleasing. "We did pop off without a word, and we're sorry for that. There was some business that couldn't be avoided. I know you hear enough of that from your parents, but it's the truth, and you hardly need a nanny at this great age. What is it you've come looking for?" Crowley discovered he had fallen into the comfortable accents of Paisley. He couldn't really tease Aziraphale for the return of his own habit.  
  
"I just... I don't know." Warlock took his phone out of his pocket and unlocked it. It didn't disguise his confusion.  
  
"How long do you think it'll be till the people who were supposed to be keeping track of you panic when they realise you've gone?"  
  
"Dunno. They're dumb." Crowley could tell he was swiping aimlessly through the menus. "I told them I was going shopping. This is a shop."  
  
"Well, we'd better get you something to show for your trip, then. How do you fancy a book?"  
  
Aziraphale blanched, returning with the smallest tea tray precariously loaded with three of his prettiest Wedgwood cups, the matching pot, creamer, and sugar bowl, and an extra saucer from the same set covered in chocolate digestives. It was a very good showing, considering Crowley was sure the set had previously only had one cup and saucer and the pot left last time he'd seen it. "Now, I'm sure nothing I have in here would interest Warlock–"  
  
"That," Warlock said, staring blankly at his empty inbox, pointing haphazardly at what Crowley could identify as a first edition of Andrew Lang's 1889 classic Blue Fairy Book. For a random choice, that was not bad luck.12 Crowley relaxed a little.  
  
"Oh, my boy, those are some exciting stories. From back before they took the naughty bits out of fairy tales." Aziraphale busied himself rearranging the coffee table to set the tea down.  
  
"Really?" Warlock looked up from his phone.  
  
"They're awful," Crowley said, thinking of the condescending nineteenth-century style, the princesses shut into crystal palaces, and the magicians broken into pieces.  
  
"I want that book," Warlock dug in. He put his phone back in his pocket, and looked expectantly at Crowley.  
  
"Do you– would you like me to read some to you?" Crowley took the book down from the shelf. He was slightly adrift.  
  
"That's stupid." Warlock went to sit on the couch, and put an entire handful of biscuits in his mouth.  
  
"All right," Crowley said, and offered the book to Warlock.  
  
Warlock rolled his eyes and said nothing through his biscuits.  
  
Aziraphale huffed and took the book himself. "_I'll_ read some from it, then, since we'll soon be parted–"  
  
"What?" There was a slight spray of crumbs over the pile where Crowley's jacket and waistcoat lay on the coffee table with Aziraphale's, which Warlock then suddenly noticed. He narrowed his eyes, looking between Crowley and Aziraphale.  
  
"After finally going off together, you're leaving each other again? Why's your shirt on the table?"  
  
"I _meant_ we'll be parted from the book, Warlock, unless you don't want this one?" Aziraphale looked hopeful.  
  
Crowley let the assumption about their going off together slide, since it was close enough. "It's a waistcoat, and I'm not currently wearing it, and it's got to be somewhere."  
  
"Give me the book. I'll read it." Warlock gave Crowley a long look, then took the book surprisingly gently out of Aziraphale's grasp. Perhaps the angel's persistent instructions about care and respect for all beings had at least stuck regarding himself.  
  
Warlock took Crowley's hand and pulled him abruptly down to the couch next to him, and then opened the book.  
  
"The Bronze Ring13. Well, that's stupid. Nobody has heard of this one. Once upon a time in a certain country there lived a king whose palace was surrounded by a spacious garden."  
  
There was always a garden, wasn't there? Crowley wasn't descended from generations of gardeners, but he could certainly do better than Aziraphale had at the manor the Dowlings had occupied for most of Warlock's childhood. He'd always had to go around and fix the nasturtiums and geraniums after Aziraphale had been at them. He had never been chosen for the lover of a princess, though. An angel was another matter.  
  
All in all it took Warlock nearly half an hour to read the story through, accounting for delays and questions like "Why wouldn't the princess just pick her own husband?" and "So he burned the dogs up and boiled the king? And that _cured_ him?" and "_Mice_ dropped the ring in the sea? That's stupid." Crowley privately agreed with Warlock's assessments, but it was nearly always more satisfying to do a good roast of a flawed work when genuine fans of the work weren't present, and Aziraphale had a fondness for these batty old stories.  
  
At length, Warlock snapped the book shut and looked hard from under his brows first at Aziraphale, then at Crowley. Crowley wasn't sure he'd pass muster.  
  
"I'm mad at you. You can't just abandon me."  
  
Crowley felt, and he didn't think it was just sympathy borne of experience, that this was a fair point. Circumstances had been extenuating, and neither he nor Aziraphale had meant to leave any evidence of themselves to miss, but apparently Adam had objected to that much messing people about, and un-erased them from Warlock's life.  
  
"Mm. Okay," said Crowley, hoping that would be enough.  
  
"Warlock, we didn't mean to. One ought to treat one's fellows with respect and kindness, and we certainly haven't. Now that you've found us, I hope you can forgive us."  
  
"Ugh. Brother Francis, you can keep this book." Warlock's eye-roll punctuated his disdain.  
  
Aziraphale looked conflicted. "Are you sure? How about you come back when you have time—and permission—and read it whenever you like? We'll be here." This was a major concession. Crowley hoped Warlock understood it.  
  
Warlock rolled his eyes again. "Fine." He stood up, showering more crumbs over Crowley's jacket and waistcoat on the table, and looked at the door. "I guess we'll be in the city for awhile."  
  
"Good, then." Crowley wanted to brush Warlock's hair, or at least tuck it behind his ears out of his face, but he knew better.  
  
"I'm gonna go home." He wiped his hands on his shirtfront and paused. "I won't tell them the spies escaped." At this, he looked more earnest than Crowley had seen him since he turned nine.  
  
"We appreciate that very much, I'm sure," Crowley quietly humored the conceit. He stepped out of Warlock's way and let him out from between the couch and the coffee table.  
  
"I'll be back. You'd better be here." Warlock stopped about halfway to the door, pondered the first-edition Just William books, and turned back around. "Don't run away from each other," he added, with a really pathetic attempt at nonchalance.  
  
Aziraphale looked at Crowley, who took a step towards the door as well, as if to escort Warlock there.  
  
"We won't," Aziraphale said. He looked very serious.  
  
"No, we can't get away from each other now." Crowley looked back at Warlock.  
  
"Good. Okay." Warlock apeared to be as miserable as Crowley had ever seen him, including the time his father had refused to take his call on Warlock's seventh birthday and his mother had snapped at him for asking her to try again.  
  
Crowley took another step toward Warlock, arms open awkwardly, and waited.  
  
Warlock crashed into him with a covert sniffle. "I missed you guys. You're so stupid. Why would I miss you?"  
  
"Oh, love," Crowley crooned, kneeling and wrapping him in a rueful hug. "I'm so sorry."  
  
Aziraphale hovered contritely just out of arm's reach. Crowley gestured him sharply into the hug with his chin. He joined.  
  
"I'm sorry too, my lad. We won't do it again. We'll be here long after you're good and tired of us, I wager anything on it," Aziraphale murmured from his side of the embrace.  
  
"What about gambling being the refuge of unsteadfast minds?" Warlock sniffed.  
  
"Did you actually tell him that? What a load of– there's plenty of maths in gambling!" Crowley was outraged.  
  
"Like you've ever done a day's worth of maths in your life, you serpent. I know you don't pay your bills."  
  
"Okay, you two." Warlock extricated himself from Crowley's grasp, and for a moment it felt a little cold. "I'm going to go, so. Fight about maths when I'm out the door. Brother Francis, let Nanny gamble if she wants to. She can afford it."  
  
"You're right about that, young man," Crowley said, standing up, the awkwardness dispelled.  
  
"I'll see if I can't find something better to occupy us both," Aziraphale persisted, retreating back to the couch and picking up the tea things.  
  
"Ew," said Warlock, "I'm leaving. Wait till I'm gone. Bye, you two," he yelled as he slammed the door open.  
  
"Goodbye, my lad. We'll see you again," promised Aziraphale.  
  
"Bye, Warlock." Crowley watched the door bounce noisily closed. He stood there a moment, thinking. And feeling. There was an awful lot of feeling happening for a little more than half an hour's lived experience.  
  
"We had the raising of that boy," he concluded.  
  
"So we did," Aziraphale agreed, "Whether he was the wrong boy or not."  
  
"No one's the wrong boy to himself," Crowley said sharply.  
  
"No," Aziraphale conceded.  
  
"Well, maybe we haven't ruined his life," Crowley hoped.  
  
"He seems to think we haven't yet," Aziraphale observed, "And now we'll be sure not to."  
  
"It's good to have another chance," Crowley said. Not everyone got second chances. "Adam seems to have thought of more than we did."  
  
"We were a bit busy at the time," Aziraphale said, "Though that's not really an excuse. I'm glad someone thought of it."  
  
"Did you give him a safely-home blessing before he crossed the threshold?" Crowley worried tangentially.  
  
"He's got one now," evaded Aziraphale, gesturing down from the ceiling with one hand before steadying the tea tray.  
  
Crowley was more tired than he had expected to be at four o'clock in the afternoon. "I'm going to bed," he decided abruptly. "You do have one, don't you? I'm not schlepping all the way home now, and I don't actually want to leave."  
  
"Oh, I'm so glad to hear it. I, erm, I have a bed in the flat upstairs," Aziraphale paused. It was anyone's guess whether he'd had the bed before just now, but Crowley didn't think it was much of a gamble to wager that he had not. It was shockingly heartwarming. Crowley knew the angel didn't generally bother with sleep.  
  
"Lead on, then. This is undiscovered territory." Crowley knew all the alleys of Soho and the intricate, mazy turns of the shop as well as he'd ever known anywhere on earth, but the Upstairs had never been his place. He intended to correct that.  
  
Aziraphale seemed to have forgotten he was holding the tray, so now he wasn't. He had folded his hands primly, and the way it went with his demure, through-the-lashes smile reminded Crowley of every time he'd ever shown up to rescue him after some ethereally motivated imprudence had got the angel into trouble. It was a carefully shielded version of the glow, like a pot lid just letting some delectable vapours out. Crowley wondered that he'd never noticed.  
  
The stairs instantly repented of any decrepitude when Aziraphale ushered him up them, and were probably also wider and better-lit than they had ever thought to be. They were still covered in stacks of books, but Crowley was perfectly capable of picking his way over them.  
  
"It's just through here," Aziraphale fussed, "and the linen closet is on the other side of the hall, if the bedding is not what you'd prefer–"  
  
"I'm collapsing under the weight of a short but excessively emotional day, Angel. A flouncy chaise would be most appropriate. I'm sure whatever you've got will be perfect." He forebore to mention that neither of their choices of linens would necessarily be constrained by the contents of any closet.  
  
The coquettish smile broadened, and Aziraphale opened a door with a silly little flourish and a sideways glance. "Have a pleasant siesta, then." He gestured expectantly.  
  
Crowley caught the fluttering hand in both of his own and, at an impulse that surprised them both, kissed the back of it. It was very warm against his lips, and shaking very slightly.  
  
He thought about sovereignty, and fealty, and homage, and reverence. They hadn't really struck his fancy before (quite the opposite, to his eternal inconvenience), but he was beginning to perceive the appeal.  
  
When he opened his eyes, which was when he realised he'd closed them, Aziraphale was a shade of pink that exquisitely complemented his robin's-egg, waistcoatless shirt and his dove-grey and ivory tartan tie. Crowley was considering how best to explain these thoughts, and then gave it up as a task for a time when he could even have them without tearing up. He pressed Aziraphale's warm, pink, genteel, _good_ hand to his cheek and closed his eyes again briefly, and then let go and strode as purposefully as he could around Aziraphale into the bedroom and fell face-first into the eiderdown.  
  
*  
  
He awoke covered in feathers, but the quilt was intact. He stretched and arched and yawned as decadently as ever Aziraphale had savoured a mouthful, and realised he'd popped his wings in his sleep, which he hadn't done for centuries. His t-shirt now covered only the back of his neck and the rise of his scapular feathers, which were twisting under its confinement, so he did away with it entirely.  
  
The tiny gasp from the corner of the room was the first he heard of his audience.  
  
It was Aziraphale in the overstuffed brocade armchair, and he had his flabbergasted face on, though he'd seen Crowley's wings just last week. "Mngh, 'Zrp? What's o'clock?"  
  
"It's eleven-thirty, you—you fiend. You've had a full night's sleep, and the night's young yet."  
  
"What? 'Ve you been here the whole six, what, seven hours?" Crowley preened a little, vanishing the pearly dust from the smooth black iridescence as he turned and sloughed new feather sheaths from the inside of his left wing.  
  
"I have books," was the slightly defensive reply.  
  
"Well, leave off with them a moment and come do my back." This ought to be good, Crowley thought, considering how lovely Aziraphale's hands had been this afternoon, just on his skin and hair, close and warm. Feathers amplified tactile feedback like hair did, but more directionally, and if anyone would know how to play that as an advantage in sensation, it would be Aziraphale, who got regular manicures and had his hair done _not_ by miracle, and surely knew how to make a hedonistic experience of grooming feathers.  
  
It was all over his face now, when Crowley did turn over his shoulder to look. The angel was _tender_. He wanted to _tend_ Crowley. That was well. Crowley was in the mood for it. He didn't remember his dreams, but he had had some, which was unusual for him, and they had been soft and gracious. Lit gently, like the light from the hall through the open door—was that a gas lamp? The hazy gleam gilded everything from the side, easing down sharp planes and mellowing angles.  
  
"Do your back?" Aziraphale sounded as though he had no idea what Crowley could possibly mean, out of countless euphemisms, literal services, or obscuring slang the phrase could be, and was scandalised by it.  
  
"The– Your hands. Thing. Like before, but feathers," Crowley said, gesturing aimlessly. He was fishing, but he thought Aziraphale would let him get away with it. "I can never reach the new ones on the top sides," he pointed over his shoulder and made a moue of demonic pathos.  
  
"Is this how you are when you've just woken up?" Aziraphale was apparently dazed by his charm. "You've come over all... beseeching." He stood hesitantly, turned in a small circle as if to evaluate the safety of the room (Crowley recognised the impulse), and then made a confused swish with his hands, obviously uncertain what to do with them now that he'd drawn attention to them. He stopped the gesture halfway through, started again, and then abandoned the idea, leaving a hand casually on the back of the armchair.  
  
"Yes, I know, the beseeching's usually your job, but I've taken a fancy to being indulged just now."  
  
Aziraphale strode toward him immediately, his insecurity evaporating. "Crowley."  
  
"Angel?"  
  
The hands on his shoulders were sudden and firm. "Let me. Oh, Lor– My– yes, just let me indulge you. It's been much too much, years and years of your catering to my whims, and wading along at my pace through my misconceptions and my apprehensions and my—my cruelties, and I will do anything, anything to start making it up to you."  
  
Crowley stared. "Aziraphale. You've been in my spirit with me. You know how I feel. You don't have to make anything up to me."  
  
"But I do. I felt your–"  
  
"_Angel_. Just. We'll talk. We'll keep talking. Not everything that has ever happened to me is your fault. Nor, as I'm... discovering it's useful to remind myself, is it _my_ fault. For now, though, I want you to crack my new pinfeathers, not because you feel guilty, but because you want to. And, and. Because I want you to. Because it'll feel good. Because it's you." Crowley put his own hand over Aziraphale's on his shoulder, and pulled it behind his neck and down to his scapulars.  
  
Aziraphale drew a settling breath, searched his face, and then came to some decision. "All right."  
  
"All right?" Crowley looked up into those eyes which, with their constant delight in discovery and pleasure, hardly ever seemed anything but new. He looked now, and saw a lot of time.  
  
Aziraphale nodded sharply, an uncharacteristically wise smile just tinting his mouth, and then knelt on the bed. Now he turned Crowley with the hands on his shoulders. "Yes. Oh, yes. I do want to. It _will_ feel good. Lie down on your front, my dear, and I'll do your back."  
  
Crowley let himself be turned, folding his wings to keep from buffeting the room. He did as he was instructed, and Aziraphale nestled busily, sort of sidesaddle, into the hollow above his hip, right up against him. He ran his fingers over the leading edge of the wing in front of him, encouraging Crowley to spread it back out. Crowley did so, carefully, fitting Aziraphale into the open space under the trailing edge.  
  
"Here we are." Aziraphale inhaled through his nose. "Oh, but you're lovely." He traced lightly over the surfaces of the joining of both Crowley's wings to his back.  
  
"Lovely as a moulting duck, I'm sure," Crowley said, trying not to flex into the touch, but craving firmer contact like an itch.  
  
"You have no idea, do you? This–"  
  
"Feathers," Crowley burst out, and raised them all, looking (as he knew from some rather convenient mirror experiments in the pharaonic days) _exactly_ like a moulting duck.  
  
"Yes. Ah, yes." Aziraphale sank both hands carefully into Crowley's scapular plumage and leaned the length of one arm over his back, almost lying over him. "Oh, I see," he said, encountering the prickles of new growth, and carefully crumbling the tiny waxy sheaths off the new feathers.  
  
"Whoo," Crowley blew, a huge shiver passing over him, a relief like no other beginning to propagate through his nervous system.  
  
"There are tons of these! How long has it been since someone has done this for you?"  
  
Crowley craned his neck around, as far as it would go, and glared.  
  
"Ah. Yes. Well, I'm here now, and we'll get them all." Aziraphale threshed meticulously through the miniscule forest like an agile, conscientious expert, and every stroke and pinch was another drop in the pool of respite. He scritched, and pulled, and drew along the feathers until each was clean, blowing across Crowley's back to disperse the dust.  
  
Crowley scooped a (formerly matching eiderdown, now memory-foam) pillow to himself and buried his face in it, noticed it was wet, and realised there were tears on his face. He ignored them, and stopped breathing.  
  
It made it harder to appreciate the preening, somehow, and Aziraphale noticed almost immediately.  
  
"Are you all right?" the dreaded, solicitous inquiry came.  
  
Crowley reminded himself that he wasn't hiding. He let his breaths huff and stutter the way they wanted to, and groaned defeatedly into the pillow. "I will be," he turned his face far enough to say in a choked tone. "Just keep on."  
  
Aziraphale drew his hands out of the feathers and set them on either side of Crowley's spine, where the long muscles were much the same whether he was winged or snake or neither. "My love, you're not enjoying it."  
  
"I _am_, I _was_– what did you call me?" Crowley sniffed pitifully.  
  
"My love? It's... you are, you know. Is it too much?" Aziraphale stroked the long muscles painstakingly, probably excavating piles of dust onto his nice quilt, but gratifying Crowley's spinal nerves so thoroughly in the process that Crowley didn't think too hard about the mess.  
  
"No, it's good. I'm. I like it. I'll get used to it. It _does_ feel good. I'm just having... feelings." Crowley's breathing evened out, and he turned his face forward into the pillow again to level out the access Aziraphale had to his neck. "Keep going," he said indistinctly.  
  
"Oh, feelings," Aziraphale said, knowing. "That's all right, then." He pulled a long, deep swipe down Crowley's back from either side of the very top of his spine, ending at the waistband of his trousers and resting there for a moment before returning to the preening Crowley had asked for.  
  
"It really is wonderful," Crowley muttered into the pillow. His eyes were drier, but there was some kind of small wild animal shivering in his brain for the light and warmth and inescapable comfort it knew was associated with this activity. Too bad for it, Crowley had escaped the inescapable. Or... He had a thought.  
  
"Aziraphale," he said into the pillow.  
  
"Yes?" The rustle and pull and furling out and smoothing down went on.  
  
"Um. You could glow a bit. More. If you like." Crowley braced himself.  
  
It was sudden, but not heavy, not rough. It matched the light flooding in the door, golden and gentle. Like Aziraphale had been waiting for him to ask. Crowley's vision (not his eyes, which were scrunched shut against the pillow) adjusted gradually.  
  
Looking at him in this state gave Crowley a similar feeling to the struggle before resolving a magic-eye poster; it was the opposite of focus. There were reflections of Aziraphale for every perceptual facility Crowley had, and they were all in their own outlay, none superimposed on each other the way they usually looked for convenience and temporal continuity. It was not entirely unlike a kaleidoscope. No wonder people sometimes got the impression of a thousand eyes.  
  
Aziraphale didn't say anything, but continued, leaning along Crowley's lower back, to open pinfeather sheaths and stroke the new feathers straight. He was nearly done with the right side, down into the edge where Crowley could reach for himself.  
  
Time did not seem to be working. It was still before midnight, when Crowley took a glance out of the pillow at his watch. It seemed like his allotted moment of– backward sloth, of active comfort, must be up. He was anticipating the end. Hadn't he been here, laid out under the ministrations of his angel, suffering bliss, for hours? Wasn't there a limit?  
  
"Do you want me to do yours?" Crowley made himself ask.  
  
"Sometime, yes," Aziraphale contemplated. "But right now, I just want to take care of you. You haven't had enough of that." The shine deepened, somehow.  
  
"I can take care of myself," Crowley protested, then reconsidered. "But I'll let you help," he amended.  
  
"I know, my love. I appreciate it," Aziraphale gleamed incrementally more.  
  
"My love." Crowley tested it quietly outside his mind. "That's right."  
  
Aziraphale shuffled the dust out of the elbow of Crowley's right wing, and sat up again from where he was bent close over Crowley to fold the long-angled limb in front of himself, into place on Crowley's back. He patted the shoulder devotedly. "I'll just switch sides, then, shall I?"  
  
"Mmh," Crowley acquiesced.  
  
As the angel levered himself off the bed and walked all the way around the edge to slide up to Crowley's left hip, the directions of the glow changed and cascaded. Crowley saw it, blooming over himself. He felt it, an intangible warmth, a sense of touch that you don't get from your normal visible spectrum. Crowley didn't know what he was so tensely anticipating. Aziraphale was only here, doing his back. Loving him. He relaxed some preoccupations and tried to just. Be.  
  
The weight of Aziraphale's forearm along his left scapula, as he lay partly over Crowley's back to card through his feathers, anchored him to his body. These touches, these beams of intensive affection, were for Crowley. Because of him. In his cause, under his name, a gift. It wasn't in spite of him, or incidental. Crowley was beloved specifically and single-mindedly, by a very stubborn and contrary angel whose capacity for love, wide and encompassing as it still might be, had definitely warped and bent to him over the millennia they'd had to customise the practise. It wasn't an accident. It wouldn't be rectified—removed.  
  
"You know, don't you," Aziraphale inquired contemplatively, his hands in constant motion, "that you don't have to prove anything to me?"  
  
"Nn," Crowley hedged.  
  
"Whatever this is, whyever you feel you must... endure it–"  
  
"N– 'snot that. 'Sgood."  
  
"My dear, you're rigid." Aziraphale pressed his own hip more insistently into Crowley's side, letting more weight down into his back. "You were putty in my hands and nearly liquid in my lap this afternoon."  
  
"Psh. That was just you. Finally. This is wing stuff."  
  
"I see." Aziraphale did not sound entirely like he saw. "It's still me, you know."  
  
"That's why it's good." Crowley tried to make the small animal in his brain aware of this. Hold Aziraphale's hand up to its nose and everything. Get the good light on it without scaring it.  
  
"But–"  
  
"'Ve just got to acclimate."  
  
"To what?" Aziraphale was very steady with his hands, and less so with his voice.  
  
"To... to you? To. It being okay. This."  
  
"I don't–"  
  
"You might not understand, a bit. I might not be able to explain it. Not to you."  
  
There was a catch in Aziraphale's breathing, and the glow went all ripply, like something had hit the surface of what it was shining through. "I suppose I deserve that," he said dryly.  
  
"It's not about what anybody deserves. It just, it just is. I told you it doesn't always matter if there's a reason to be scared? I don't want to be scared of this, and I'm not, really, but I have to let myself know that. I'm not proving anything to you. I know you're– It's not for you. It's for me. In a glowy way? You're helping, Aziraphale." Crowley had not had much time to understand himself before trying to articulate it to anyone else, but he knew Aziraphale had been there in the not-really-a-place where he'd discovered it, and could hopefully make the connections Crowley didn't have words for.  
  
Aziraphale was quiet for a time, face very close to the feathers he was combing. Crowley couldn't see his expression, but the love was still oscillating off him like the patterns on the bottom of a swimming pool someone had just cannonballed into.  
  
"I hadn't noticed how much I cared for you until you saved my books from those Nazis in the Blitz."  
  
"Ah." That explained some things.  
  
"I had been hiding it from myself, you see, so I wouldn't have to be afraid."  
  
"Makes sense," Crowley judged. Might have been a better strategy than his own.  
  
Aziraphale tutted. "It was cowardice, and I'm sorry for it."  
  
"Ugh," Crowley grunted, "_please_ stop apologising."  
  
"I'm trying to explain something, if you'll bear with me," Aziraphale said patiently.  
  
"All right, but out with it, if you would. I can't read your mind. Or, you know. Not here. Or anywhere. Unless we. Whatever."  
  
Aziraphale gave that the attention it deserved, which was none, and brushed off the crook of Crowley's left wing, nearly done with this side, too. His elbow was on the verge of digging into Crowley's ribs, but he had judged the distribution of his weight well enough that it didn't quite hurt, and it gave him the best angle for both looking closely and riffling through the feathers right in the middle of the top side.  
  
He hummed, concerned, into Crowley's coverts. "The main difference between us, I think, is that you have never let fear limit you. In little ways, maybe," he said, forestalling Crowley's objections, "but not for long, and not for the high stakes." He was speaking nearly into the back of Crowley's neck, very low, as if the secrets he revealed were dangerous merely to utter aloud. Maybe they were. Crowley's skin prickled.  
  
"You asked the hard questions, not just at the beginning, when nobody understood the consequences, but the whole time. You showed me truths I would never have found on my own. You took the kind of insurance policy I was nearly too afraid to give you, and it probably saved your life." Crowley couldn't really argue.  
  
"You're in the habit of courage, and I am not."  
  
Crowley thought about Aziraphale's courage, from his recent performance in Hell all the way back to the time when he'd lied directly to the face of the Almighty, and took a breath, but Aziraphale ploughed on.  
  
"That's not to say I'm not capable of it. I was a soldier, once, but... I didn't like it. I've learned myself better since that war, and I don't want to fight another. And you _still_ had to convince me war was worth averting, the world was worth saving. Me! The only angel who even knows anything real about the world." Aziraphale snorted. "I was afraid."  
  
"But you did it anyway," Crowley mumbled.  
  
"The way you always do," Aziraphale said immediately. "My point is," he sighed, "you have so much practise doing the thing despite the fear, that I'm not sure how clear it is to you that sometimes you might wait a bit, and the fear will lessen, or even go away." He chuckled bitterly. "That's what I'm good at, you see." He pulled one last scapular feather straight, blowing gustily over the leading edge with the grain of the feathers to get the last dust out. "And that's your left side done."  
  
Crowley realised that, despite himself, he had lapsed into his usual state of soft attention to Aziraphale's disquisition. His wings were sloppily askew, and he had let go of the beastly tension in his upper back. He opened his eyes.  
  
"Shall I– I'll... I see your point. Thank you." It was a good point. Perhaps he needn't prove everything to himself immediately.  
  
"You're so entirely welcome, my dear, I don't even know how to tell you." Aziraphale stroked his hair, now, a pleasure with no attendant baggage, and Crowley was beginning to see the advantage of taking the easy way sometimes.  
  
"Now, if you'd be so kind as to put these away and turn over, I have some ideas." Aziraphale was getting bossy.  
  
"Ooh, ideas," Crowley mocked, doing as he was bossed.  
  
"Now, hear me out," Aziraphale qualified.  
  
Crowley braced himself and looked skeptically, out of habit, at Aziraphale's animated face from his place among the pillows.  
  
"You know best about your feelings and your own body, of course, but I can't help thinking you've just undergone a bit of an..." he trailed off uncertainly.  
  
"Ordeal?" Crowley suggested, not really believing it until he'd said it aloud.  
  
"Yes, exactly. You've had an ordeal, and though you've come through it beautifully, I often quite like to find a good book and a cup of hot cocoa, have some time for myself–"  
  
"If you think I'm letting you out of this bed _now_," Crowley grumbled, and made to sit up.  
  
"Oh, no, my dear! I didn't mean time alone– More like time dedicated to myself, for my own purposes." Aziraphale frowned, and set a hand down on Crowley's shoulder. "I wouldn't leave you now."  
  
"All right," Crowley huffed, and settled back into the dent he'd arranged in the bedding, gesturing for Aziraphale to return to petting his hair. "What d'you have in mind, then?"  
  
Aziraphale scooted closer to Crowley's side, the better to run soothing fingers through Crowley's surprisingly upright bedhead. "I think you should have whatever you like, is all. Whatever you do instead of books and cocoa."  
  
Crowley pondered the idea. He liked his car very much, certainly, but it wasn't as much of a rush to drive it too fast when Aziraphale wasn't in the passenger seat. He enjoyed the verdancy of his houseplants and the knowledge that it was terror of him that inspired them to it, but he wouldn't say it was a comfort, exactly, which was what he thought Aziraphale was getting at. He did find a kind of pleasure in keeping up with the times, looking sharp by standing out while fitting in, but part of that was how it related to his work, which was not a comfort so much as a familiar obligation.  
  
He turned onto his side for more petting and looked sheepishly at Aziraphale. "It's mostly drinking and sleeping chez Crowley after an ordeal, I'm afraid. And that mood's passed."  
  
Aziraphale looked a little sad, but not surprised. "Then, if you're up for it, I'm going to try some things I know about, and you'll have to tell me which ones you like." He obligingly stroked the side of Crowley's head and down his neck a bit.  
  
Crowley smirked. "Angel, did you just ask me if I'm up for it?"  
  
Aziraphale cleared his throat. It was obviously unnecessary.  
  
"Well, I wasn't going to start with that, but it's definitely among books and cocoa as an ordeal recovery strategy."  
  
Crowley boggled.  
  
"I– what?"  
  
"It's not my usual go-to, considering the– Well, considering, but it has its advantages–"  
  
"Considering _what_?"  
  
Aziraphale pursed his lips huffily. "You know very well that I'm something of a persona non grata in the Upstairs books, and have been for quite awhile. Spiritual union requires a degree of trust and vulnerability that nobody has been exactly willing to extend since, well, since Before–"  
  
"Ohmyg– Oh my," Crowley babbled. "You're talking about– And you haven't–"  
  
"You needn't rub it in," Aziraphale snapped, needled. "Just because _you're_ so impressive and well-admired, I'm sure they're lining up in droves," he started.  
  
"Aziraphale. No," Crowley tried to explain. "I haven't either–"  
  
"Oh, balderdash," was the reply, "We just looked in each other's psyches, I saw the signs–"  
  
"_Angel_," Crowley interrupted implacably, "That's all you."  
  
Aziraphale looked something like the breath had been punched out of him, but also like he was tentatively considering enjoying it. "Do you mean to say," he breathed, "that the anchors and channels and radials and everything are all–"  
  
Crowley decided it was time to suspend the potential misunderstandings cartwheeling out from Aziraphale's one-sided conversation, and grabbed Aziraphale by the nape with one hand, covering his mouth with the other. He faced him head on, turning in his pillow nest, and set their foreheads together.  
  
"I wasn't lying, or prevaricating, or anticipating, when I said I loved you."  
  
"Mm–" Aziraphale attempted to interject.  
  
"Or, if I haven't technically said it," Crowley continued, upon a very fast but exceedingly thorough mental review of the events of the last couple of days, "I will now. It's not just you, despite your celestial show-off glow. I do love you, most awfully, have for ages, so let's get that settled."  
  
Aziraphale made another start, but Crowley forestalled him.  
  
"You're talking about spiritual union, the thing where two angels, or, perhaps, occult beings who were once angels, become one spiritually. The thing that one guy early on asked some angel about that eventually got stolen and adapted into mortal marriage. You were saying you hadn't, since before half of us got tossed out the Almighty's window. And you think I have, because I've got signs in the swathes of me you managed to perceive when we were traipsing about bodiless."  
  
Aziraphale made it clear that he would have said "er" if his mouth had been available for his own use.  
  
"You absolute numpty, do you think Hell goes around encouraging, or even allowing, spiritual unity? Those anchors and channels and radials and whatever are from six thousand years of aligning myself to _you_, much good it's done me," Crowley said, and took his hand from Aziraphale's mouth to pass it over his own eyes in melodramatic despair.  
  
"Ah," said Aziraphale. "I'd hoped, but one tries not to assume."  
  
"Assume away. It can't possibly make more of an ass out of either of us."  
  
Aziraphale gave him an odd look, and then took his hands, one from his brow where it was reflecting his heightened passions, the other from Aziraphale's own neck. "In that case, in lieu of starting any _more_ ordeals for you to deal with, may I suggest–"  
  
"Sex? Whyever not," Crowley tried to suppress a slightly hysterical laugh, but only honked desperately into his own shoulder.  
  
"I do think you could use a nice relaxing–"  
  
"I've no doubt," Crowley giggled into his collarbone, cursing his own face for the lamentably, heinously uncool reaction he was having to his nearly every deepest longing being set within his reach.  
  
"Crowley," Aziraphale said reproachfully, "Do you even want–"  
  
"Oh, I've run out of appropriate figures to swear by," he choked, "but please believe me when I say I absolutely, unequivocally do want. That."  
  
Aziraphale pondered for what seemed a long moment, absently stroking Crowley's palm with his thumb. Crowley couldn't believe it. But he must.  
  
"Why don't we start slow?" Aziraphale closed his hands over Crowley's.  
  
"Ah, wouldn't want to go too fast for you," Crowley said weakly.  
  
Aziraphale ground his teeth audibly, and exhaled with fearsome force through his nose. "I will regret the timing of that foolish, selfish remark beyond the ending of the world," he murmured, dangerously gently, seemingly to himself. "I am ready, and if you are, I would very much appreciate the opportunity to start making up for the wait."  
  
"Very, er. Very ready. Opportunity granted. Go on, then," said Crowley, sorry he'd brought it up. He hadn't been thinking.  
  
"No, it's a fair point," Aziraphale acknowledged. "You must promise me, my love, that you'll tell me, or stop me, if anything's too much." He shook Crowley's hands a little, like reins, a driver encouraging a standing horse.  
  
Crowley looked back up into his strange-coloured eyes, squinting ineffectually at the glow. "I do, I promise," he said.  
  
Aziraphale's smile was very slow, and fully reflected how much of a bastard he could sometimes be. "I believe you," he said, and crawled up Crowley's length, pressing him back into his pillow nest, burning with the light of a thousand loves, wheeling his extraplanar rings, now setting his hands on Crowley's face.  
  
Crowley swallowed. Aziraphale's smile gentled.  
  
"So, rather than scare you, I'm hoping to soothe some of those exposed nerves you always seem to be compensating for with your sunglasses or hoods or social camouflage," Aziraphale said casually, and made himself tangent to Crowley in more planes. It was not a distraction from the physical pressure, but an addition to it, and it was _comfortable_, and Crowley found himself squaring more of his extrageometrical quintessence up with Aziraphale. Lines of emotion and perception extending out of anchors slackened from their taut, frantic hold. The channels and venues through which they passed were relaxed, no longer abraded by the directional pressure.  
  
"Let's– Ah, let's get everything arranged properly," Aziraphale stalled, and sat up over Crowley's lap, taking his hands from Crowley's face with one last sweet pat, and setting them over Crowley's hips. He smoothed unconsciously over the bones on each side and turned the wiggling glow into a crescendo of warmth and tooth-achingly kind consideration. Oh, it wasn't light, it wasn't sound, but there was so much in it, and Crowley could only flex slightly when Aziraphale brought more of his blessed capacity for love to bear on the plane of mortal existence.  
  
"Hzh," Crowley said. "Awha– mbs– ghk," he elaborated.  
  
"Yes, my dear," answered Aziraphale, letting go of his hips and grasping his limp hand on the quilt to pat it with reassuring condescension. "Let me just harmonise to your rotational frequency and all that, and we can really start getting on with it."  
  
Aziraphale was turning? He was vibrating. He was singing. He was doing something, and Crowley's entire being was cloven to him. It was like the dissipation of a very bad, very long headache he hadn't known he was having, but it wasn't just in his head. It was everywhere, as he was everywhere, and so was Aziraphale. It was especially piquant, or poignant, maybe something of a perturbation, that they were actually here; they hadn't faffed off to the non-location outside of the universe to which Crowley had initially fainted them. This was real, this was here, and Crowley was here, being contained by and containing Aziraphale. Every single part of him was bathed in appreciation, consideration, and awe the likes of which he hadn't felt since the beginning of time.  
  
It wasn't only metaphysical, either. An angel's love was healing, after all, and being joined to one in love could hardly be less so. Crowley's actual eyes were clearer than they had been since before the fourteenth century. His lungs eased, his backbone unkinked. He felt the cleanliness of his blood in his renal vein. Aziraphale was there.  
  
And he was along, among, _in_ Aziraphale as well. The corporation poised so assuredly over his own was part of him, too; familiar not only from long observation, but from recent temporary inhabitation, it was so bright, so soft, so dear, that he reached helplessly out to pull it closer to his own. Aziraphale was lying on top of him in every other way, and Crowley needed him to do it this way as well. And he didn't have to ask, because Aziraphale needed it equally, had only refrained in order to keep him from being overwhelmed. As if Crowley didn't need all the whelming he could get, of this kind.  
  
Their selves got closer and closer and more thoroughly parallel, until their asymptotic relationship changed, and they converged, and were one. It was not an eruption or an overrunning, as Crowley had half-expected from the way he'd been opened to himself outside of time. Instead, Crowley and Aziraphale ringed and interlocked and radiated, but in such perfect coordination it was almost easy; it was active, and it took a lot of work, but the effort was so beautiful it was a screaming pleasure even to observe it, let alone participate in it.  
  
They were on Aziraphale's custom-manifested bed, lying as close together on the eiderdown as two human-shaped beings can lie, but they were also endless myriads of eyes looking deeply into themselves-each other, and whole tapestries of omnidirectional rays woven together in exquisite consummation of a long desire. Aziraphale giggled like a loon, and so did Crowley. They were bubbles and quantum particles, and they were the faultless drapery of cosmic fabric, and it was a herculean job to stay this way, and Crowley never wanted it to end.  
  
"Blh," said Crowley, hoping Aziraphale got what he meant.  
  
"Ha," Aziraphale agreed, adjusting his mass and his gravity along with it. He was infinitely heavy, but only to Crowley, keeping him down and safe, preventing him from blowing away in their maelstrom of joy.  
  
"Ah," Crowley expounded. "Mm."  
  
Crowley tasted the old, old longing they had both pressed so mercilessly into themselves, that they might now consume it. He gathered the crumbly abundance of piercingly sweet memories to themselves, marking the texture and its complement to the longing, like wine and halvah. It was not too much. He could handle it. But it was so _very_ much. Direct internal exposure to the strongest, most individual love that Crowley had ever perceived; possibly the most there had ever been. It was not divine; it was better. It was only for him. Crowley breathed into it.  
  
Maybe some stars were exploding, somewhere. Crowley liked stars, quite a lot, but he didn't really regret it.  
  
They settled.  
  
He didn't have any words for Aziraphale, but he didn't need them.  
  
He had never been so happy. He was glowing with it.  
  
*  
  
Crowley woke, again, unexpectedly covered in feathers. This time they were white. He worried they'd burst the quilt.  
  
No, Aziraphale had cocooned them in a wing chrysalis. Crowley reached a hand past Aziraphale's shoulder and felt under the coverts for the down. It was definitely softer than ducks.  
  
"Oh, you needn't–" Aziraphale started.  
  
"Just feeling the soft," Crowley assured him.  
  
Aziraphale wiggled his head on the pillow where he faced Crowley, looking hesitantly pleased. "Well, I _am_ soft," he said.  
  
"It's one of the things I love about you," Crowley said stolidly. "Enough hard in the world. All the best things are soft."  
  
Aziraphale quirked a tiny smile and somehow managed to look up at Crowley through his lashes from lying on his side. "Oh?" He was fishing, now, but turnabout was fair play.  
  
"Cake." Crowley hummed. "This bed." He got distracted looking at the dimple in Aziraphale's cheek. "Ducks."  
  
"Quite." Aziraphale covered a delicate yawn.  
  
"Did you sleep?" Crowley was surprised.  
  
"Just a bit. It seemed polite." Aziraphale certainly didn't have the hallmarks of a morning lie-in. His clothing was immaculate as ever, and his hair not the slightest bit askew.  
  
Crowley glanced at his watch, and then looked again. "Is it still– It's midnight?"  
  
"It's noon," Aziraphale corrected him with another covert smile, and withdrew his wings enough that the sunlight was visible streaming in the bedroom window.  
  
"What, really?" Crowley's yawn was much less delicate than Aziraphale's. "If I sleep more than six hours at once it's usually on purpose," he explained. "Must've worn myself out."  
  
"I'd say so," Aziraphale nearly cooed. "And you had a bit of help. You were due for a good hug and another rest. Nothing adds up like vigilance fatigue, and we've been watching longer than anybody."  
  
Aziraphale would know, Crowley guessed. Soldier in another life, and all.  
  
"What would you say to lunch at the Wolseley?" Crowley felt new. He felt like going out.  
  
Aziraphale fanned and flipped his wings to his back, brushing feathers fleetingly over Crowley's bare torso. He looked absurdly flattered. "That sounds simply delightful. They've got the most marvelous coq au vin with creamed potatoes at lunchtime." His eyes were very wide.  
  
Crowley rubbed a hand down his chest, chasing the brush of Aziraphale's primaries. "I think you'll find we have a reservation for half one, which gives us time for a leisurely ramble through the park." Aziraphale was watching his hand, and had turned a strange colour.  
  
"Yes, just the ticket," Aziraphale said absently.  
  
"Would you rather not walk?" Crowley miracled his accustomed t-shirt, waistcoat, and jacket on, and then busied himself eliminating the featherdust and biscuit crumbs from them.  
  
"No, I'd love a stroll," Aziraphale hurried to assure him, raising his eyes to Crowley's. "I'll just pop down and get my coat," he said, and disappeared.  
  
"Huh," Crowley said to himself, and got on with the slightly difficult work of climbing out of Aziraphale's bed.  
  
Neither the cluttered staircase nor the shop downstairs looked any different in the light of Crowley's momentous, restful happiness. They needn't; they were Aziraphale's, and he was a constant.  
  
Crowley put a bit of extra swagger in on the way to the door, and handed Aziraphale into the coat he was still clutching dreamily. "Shall we?" He offered his elbow.  
  
"Let's," said Aziraphale, and gave him a goopy look, twining a hand elegantly through the crook of his arm before opening the door and tugging them both through.  
  
It was a glorious day. They needn't have bothered with their coats. The ducks in the park were perhaps slightly more understanding than usual when their provender was delayed by the need to gesture expansively while arguing a point or stare openly and fondly at the arguer. Distraction was, in fact, rampant; Crowley was so thoroughly attuned to Aziraphale's thesis on the superiority of Kashmiri saffron to Sardinian that he didn't notice Warlock's bodyguard approaching till he was nearly on top of their bench.  
  
"Wotcher, Donovan," Crowley greeted the towering man. Aziraphale paused in his lecture, hands hanging in the air.  
  
"Afternoon, Ms. Ashtoreth, Mister Francis," Donovan replied impassively. "The young sir would like to join your party, if it wouldn't be an imposition."  
  
"Oh, certainly, it'd be a treat," Aziraphale answered for both of them, fluttering. "We hadn't expected to see him so– well, we hadn't expected to see him here."  
  
Crowley looked around for the young sir, surprised to have missed sight of him, but his minders were apparently coordinating better today, and had managed to keep him in the car at the edge of the park until Donovan had a chance to secure the area. Warlock bounded with abandon out of the door of the black sedan, then realised how enthusiastic he looked, and sauntered the rest of the way to the bench.  
  
"Are you on a date?" He had set his jaw against a smile, and the result was a ludicrous pout.  
  
Crowley looked at Aziraphale. Aziraphale blushed.  
  
"Yes, we are," said Crowley, and Warlock almost succeeded in entirely suppressing a shriek as Aziraphale turned more colours. "But if you'd like to join us for lunch we're going to have some nice chicken across the street. Donovan's welcome, too," he added, squinting up at the looming guardian.  
  
"Really? You're not busy?" Warlock kicked the ground.  
  
"Well, we are, but you're important," Crowley said simply, and stood up. He offered a hand to Aziraphale, who took it like a damsel stepping out of a carriage, and they turned to Warlock.  
  
"You always liked bangers and mash when we had them before," Aziraphale said. "I like the mash they have for lunch at the Wolseley. The chicken has a pretty strong sauce, but I think it's lovely, and the potatoes are probably just right for you. Or of course you could get something else, whatever you'd like," he continued, and glanced at Crowley. "Good thing our reservation was for one of the four-person tables."  
  
"Yes, lucky, that," Crowley grinned.  
  
It was a bit of a tight fit for the four of them even at the end of the lunch rush, but Donovan was a paragon of decorum and Warlock wasn't very big. He did like the potatoes, and Crowley could tell he liked being included in their time even better.  
  
"So what are they teaching American children abroad these days?" Crowley hoped his early instruction had been enough preparation for the admittedly cutthroat expatriate school system.  
  
"A bunch of bull–" Warlock declaimed, and rolled his eyes when Donovan pointedly cleared his throat. "Honestly, though, school's not very interesting. Just a bunch of stupid tests. Brother Francis always had much better lessons in the garden."  
  
Crowley hid a wince; he suspected Aziraphale's botany wasn't exactly up to snuff, nor indeed his biology in general. Hard to keep on top of the latest scientific developments when you're a century or so behind in most other respects. And yet, some things had to move slowly to get enough momentum.  
  
Crowley realised he was smiling when he noticed Warlock smirking back. Aziraphale had a fond grin as well. Donovan was the only one at the table with a straight face.  
  
"Well, I know firsthand the system's been designed to produce the highest level of frustration, so the best thing you could do would be to find some kind of fun in it, if you can." Crowley wiped the last trace of red wine from his lips with his snowy napkin, and set it next to his empty plate (courtesy mostly of a certain ethereal hedonist, significantly aided by a bottomless teenaged stomach). "Actually, it's Thursday; shouldn't you be in school today, anyway?" He raised an eyebrow.  
  
Donovan spoke up. "It's Thanksgiving, Ms. Ashtoreth. American School has a long weekend."  
  
Crowley's other eyebrow rose as well. Warlock had clearly had no one else to do Thanksgiving dinner with. His parents were probably at a diplomatic function. "We had chicken instead of turkey, but I hope it was a good substitute," he finally said.  
  
"Yeah," Warlock said quietly, "It was pretty good."  
  
Aziraphale beamed. "It's always nice to have a bit of a reunion on a holiday."  
  
Crowley agreed, and felt the furrows smoothing out of his face. "Very true." He cocked his head. "But I think they're nice the rest of the time, as well."  
  
Warlock tilted his hair into his eyes and the corner of his mouth lifted.  
  
Aziraphale snatched the bill out of the waiter's hand before Donovan could get a glimpse of it, and sent it off well-padded. Crowley decided not to worry today about speeding up the inflation they were doubtless wreaking in the long term on the London economy by miracling up the money for their– well, their dates.  
  
"It's been an outstanding afternoon, Ms. Ashtoreth, Mister Francis," said Donovan, standing pointedly and looking at Warlock. "I'm afraid we have an appointment for the evening, so we won't keep you."  
  
Crowley stood as well, and offered a businesslike hand to Warlock. "It really has been lovely," he said, and smiled. "We'll do it again soon."  
  
Warlock brightened. "I don't have class over lunch on Thursdays anyway, most of the time," he said hopefully, taking Crowley's hand and shaking it as smoothly as his father might, but with more affection.  
  
"Let's set something up," Aziraphale said, offering his own hand to Warlock for a diplomatic shake, and then to Donovan.  
  
"See that he doesn't forget to call," Crowley suggested, handing Donovan a very nice card with the number to Aziraphale's landline on it in gold-leaf calligraphy. Aziraphale wasn't rolling his eyes, but Crowley could tell only the company prevented him. Maybe the gold was a bit much.  
  
"I'll make sure he does," Donovan responded professionally, but with a hint of warmth.  
  
With Warlock safely ensconced in the imposing but nondescript black sedan that waited to receive him, Crowley stood straighter than usual to see it weave off into traffic. "Let's not leave it too long," he mused, and offered his arm again to Aziraphale. "Now then. Drinks and some Bernstein on the turntable?"  
  
"Yes, all right, I'll let you play the Chichester Psalms," Aziraphale conceded, and took his hand instead of his elbow. Their hands swung together between them all the way back to the bookshop.  
  
Two slow, contemplative glasses into the 1985 Vin du Rosier, Crowley thought most of Aziraphale's usual resistance to the Bernstein might have been trying to spare Crowley some pain. It was true, the words were all about righteousness and dwelling in a certain House, but– that wasn't Crowley's house anymore, and it was all right for some people to like it. He had the better deal, in a way, and the psalms weren't going to hurt him. _Kosi r'vayah_, wound the beautiful melodies of the second movement14, and Crowley thought his cup maybe did run over.  
  
"My cos– My cup runneth over," he said aloud, and sniffed into the wine.  
  
"Don't get it on the carpet, if you can help it, please," worried Aziraphale. "Oh, gracious, it's black and red now anyway, it doesn't matter. Spill away."  
  
"I _meant_– Never mind, you—you. I'm happy, is all," Crowley complained, and went to lie next to the speaker, balancing his glass in one palm and draping himself over Aziraphale's feet. "This is distressingly good."  
  
"The wine? Well, I did have it off that rascal Aldo in Bordeaux. He was supposed to have sent it all to the Pope–"  
  
"Not the wine. Well, the wine is very nice. But, the music. And this, here. And you."  
  
"Oh, you're nothing to sneeze at yourself, you know," Aziraphale grinned at him.  
  
"I'm learning," Crowley said, and settled in for the long, tortured string lamentation at the beginning of the third movement15. It certainly suffered a lot. There was nothing like empathy to keep you from feeling alone.  
  
He wasn't, though. Aziraphale was here. "I'm glad you're here," he murmured.  
  
Aziraphale nudged him with a gentle toe. "Come up off the floor, my love, and you'll be even gladder."  
  
"Give it a second, now. It's about to be glad as well," Crowley protested, snuggling up to the speaker.  
  
The grievous tension broke into a set of gorgeously calm rocking swells, and the words rolled over Crowley entirely free from distress. "Lo gava libi," he hummed into the speaker.  
  
"No, I suppose a haughty heart was never your problem," Aziraphale pondered. "And we're both well shut of making a to-do about things too wonderful for us to understand." He nudged Crowley again. "Come on, you old serpent, I've got a lap with your name on it."  
  
"What, in the albeph– alfef– in the abjad?" Crowley let himself be lifted off the floor and into Aziraphale's lap, cuddling shamelessly into the tune and the warmth, careful not to slosh his glass too fervently. "I don't see any writing," he mock-disapproved.  
  
"Ah, it's all underneath," Aziraphale tittered, and stroked Crowley's hair.  
  
"Oh, you put it under there where it's none of my business? How am I supposed to read the label, then?" Crowley was just talking, mind half stuck in the Bernstein.  
  
"It's definitely your business, if you like of it," Aziraphale said, and then audibly changed colour. It sounded a little like steam.  
  
"What– _awhup_– pshwhat?" Crowley took Aziraphale's hand from his hair and pulled it down to his chest with his free hand. He wiggled laboriously onto his back and looked Aziraphale in the very pink face, sideways and upside-down from his lap.  
  
"The underneath, that is." Aziraphale swallowed. "And related business."  
  
"With the– bits? Is that something you do?" Crowley had a very strong imagination, but he could only just imagine it. His fingers were tingling, and his eyes were watering. He raised his glass and waved it at Aziraphale. "Hold on, let me un-slosh a titch."  
  
The room, and the angel, got slightly less wobbly on more sober consideration, but the electric sensation where his hand covered Aziraphale's remained.  
  
Aziraphale miracled the glass out of Crowley's other hand. Crowley hoped it had gone to the kitchen. It was very nice wine.  
  
"It's something I'd like to do," Aziraphale said, still very pink, and very bravely looking Crowley in the eye. That was a lot to handle. Aziraphale took the hand Crowley's glass had just vacated.  
  
"That's– What?" Crowley had just got the hang of being happy, and the idea seemed a bit– something. Crowley wasn't sure what.  
  
"I'm told it's magical," Aziraphale wheedled.  
  
"Fgh– br," Crowley spluttered. "You can do real magic! You just did!" Here was Aziraphale's fascination with doing things the human way, the hard way16, again.  
  
"Yes, but it'll be fun!" His tone was the deadly kind of hopeful that usually spelled annihilation for Crowley's resistance to whatever blessed shenanigans Aziraphale was trying to instigate.  
  
"Fun," Crowley groused for form's sake, "You and your– Why must everything be fun. It's not natural."  
  
"Certainly it is," Aziraphale burbled repressively. "Look at any of the–"  
  
"It's not angelic, then," Crowley interrupted, knowing full well that fun was the natural motivation for the majority of all actions ever taken on Earth. "You've got all these Principal abilities, and you want to come blithering about in demonic arenas with your fun–"  
  
"It's just as angelic as it is demonic, my dear," Aziraphale pointed out with infuriating patience. "Heaven's side have got Teresa, certainly, in marble no less, and Hildegard in all sorts of writing–"  
  
"Don't tell me you were involved in that kind of fun. That's not your game. Is it?" Crowley really hadn't considered that going about inspiring divine ecstasy in devout women might be Aziraphale's game, and a frisson of apprehension fluttered through him at the thought that Aziraphale might have a whole facet to his hedonism that Crowley had been unfamiliar with.  
  
"Not for work, no. Nor much for fun, really. That's why I'm asking." Aziraphale's eyebrows crept together in a concerned frown that had an unfortunate17 track record.  
  
"What, exactly, are you asking?" Crowley wanted him to say it. Things were usually clearer out loud.  
  
"I'm asking for your indulgence," Aziraphale waffled, like a prize waffler. Winner of the Belgian waffle-eating contest, Expo 58 in Brussels, Century 21 Exposition in Seattle in 1962, 1964 New York World's Fair. The angel had got in on the ground floor with waffling.  
  
"Indulge me in advance return, then, Aziraphale," Crowley insisted pedantically, thinking briefly of waffles and their consumption and the potential fun quotient of a nice brunch. "What do you want?"  
  
Aziraphale quailed, his frown creeping from concerned to hurt in a millimeter of expressive corporation. "Nothing! I don't want anything from you, if you don't want to give it! I'd hoped–" he sighed, and shook the frown off his forehead before Crowley had realised that was what his hands had been itching about, "I'd hoped to give something to you, actually. But I absolutely won't if you'd rather I didn't."  
  
Crowley relented slightly, and squeezed Aziraphale's hands. "For all you know, I've been gagging for it for centuries, Angel. Just tell me."  
  
Aziraphale closed his eyes. "I'd like us to– Well, to be involved. Carnally."  
  
Crowley considered and discarded several jokes about meat, and a question about how drunk Aziraphale might still be. He'd clearly thought about this.  
  
Crowley hadn't meant to let the silence stretch so long. He looked at Aziraphale's brow, wrinkling deeper in pained chagrin by the second. If he let it go on any longer, Aziraphale was going to apologise for wanting something, and it was well past time for both of them to be done with that.  
  
"Do you think I'll need the bits? Only, it's an awful lot of effort." Crowley gathered Aziraphale's hands so that they were pressed flat onto his chest.  
  
Aziraphale's eyes opened, and delighted incredulity replaced the chagrin. "Ah. No, as long as you've got the right nerves, stands to reason it would work just as well without the actual... bits."  
  
"Ah, good. I only ever had them on for company, and I think you know me better than that."  
  
"Company?" Aziraphale's voice broke.  
  
"The baths? The saunas? In gymnasio? You were there for most of that anyway, unless I was off with the women." Crowley pondered the historical human penchant for collective nakedness.  
  
"Well, that's been a long time, hasn't it? Goodness." Aziraphale sniffed. Crowley couldn't tell if his censure was for the ancient habit or for the length of time since public nudity had been considered casual in their neck of the woods. "You didn't need them for work?"  
  
"You know I've always been more of a big picture operator."  
  
"Hmm, you have. So I never, er, consummated an inspiration, so to speak, and you didn't... lead them into temptation?"  
  
"Gave them directions, more like. They don't need much leading. Below always makes it sound as if they need to be shoved into the car and driven into tempation, but they've all got their own vehicles. Maybe not as good as mine."  
  
"You do have a good car."  
  
Crowley grinned up at Aziraphale. "Thanks. I'm glad you like it. You're the only one I drive myself."  
  
Aziraphale snorted. "You do definitely drive me."  
  
"Further than I realised, apparently."  
  
"I honestly don't know how you could have missed it, my dear. I've haven't exactly been subtle."  
  
Crowley managed a supine shrug, Aziraphale's fingers pleasantly hot on his sternum. "Not really my area." He contemplated it. "Could be, though, if you're there."  
  
Aziraphale wrenched his hands back and covered his face. It didn't hide the colour. Or the glow, if Crowley opened to it. "I can't believe this."  
  
With some slightly serpentine impulses, it wasn't too much of a struggle to fold up and slide backwards to sit entirely in Aziraphale's lap and lay his face against Aziraphale's cheek where his hands didn't cover. "Neither can I," he said. "And yet here we are."  
  
"Agh," said Aziraphale, and wrapped his arms around Crowley's shoulders. He still had his eyes closed. The turntable was clicking at the end of the record.  
  
"You're going to have to drive this time, Angel," Crowley said quietly into the hair next to Aziraphale's very pink ear. "You're the one who knows what you want."  
  
"As you wish," said Aziraphale, and scooped him up in both arms.  
  
Despite the harmless and inconsequential appearance he affected, Aziraphale had been made for strength. Crowley never exactly forgot that, but he had also never had it demonstrated upon his person so effectively. Neither of them technically needed to breathe, but they did by default according to the autonomous functions of their corporations, and Aziraphale's breathing changed not a whit as he stood with Crowley draped between his arms like a ball python over an educational ambassador, stretched slightly, loosely, the better to admire. Nor did Aziraphale seem bothered by the effort of carrying him up the stairs, only stepping surefootedly around the book stacks and over the bedroom threshold with a slightly distant gaze and an expression of– Well, of devilish anticipation.  
  
The length of his gaze changed very suddenly as he set Crowley deliberately down on his bed. It was an extremely short distance, now, and the attention was so focused Crowley imagined it might burn, if it hadn't been composed of the same painless gleam as the love that radiated off him. It came with a growing, manic smile that might have been frightening on anyone else. Aziraphale's teeth were very white.  
  
"May I kiss you?" he asked.  
  
Crowley blinked. "Go for it," he managed.  
  
The pressure of Aziraphale's lips on his was immediate, and though it was restrained to perfect gentility, Crowley felt a well of force behind it nearly commensurate with the depth of affection. It was a feeling both soft and strong, there on that skin with so much capacity for feeling, and Crowley wasn't sure how to connect it to the rest of his feelings. Aziraphale's breath wafted over his face, disturbing the little hairs and giving him the shivers. Aziraphale's hand still rested on Crowley's knee, steadying him after having set him down. The other cradled his nape, pulling Crowley closer, holding him to Aziraphale.  
  
"Mm," said Aziraphale, and pulled his face back to look at Crowley.  
  
"Mm?" inquired Crowley.  
  
"I get the impression kissing is not really _it_ for you," Aziraphale calculated, still looking unearthly pleased.  
  
"I haven't much practise," Crowley temporised. "Try it again?"  
  
Aziraphale had one knee on the bed. He raised himself the rest of the way up and lay next to Crowley, up on one elbow, still holding the back of Crowley's neck. He touched Crowley so lightly on the chin that he barely felt it, tilting his face infinitesimally. He looked, so intently it was nearly uncomfortable, at Crowley's eyes, his hairline, his cheekbones. He pressed a tiny kiss to the corner of Crowley's mouth where he was smirking. Crowley's smirk grew. Aziraphale followed it, then brushed a new, firmer kiss to Crowley's cheekbone, and couldn't contain his own smirk.  
  
Aziraphale drew back again, but not far. "I've always wanted to do that," he said, searching Crowley's eyes. "Do you like it?"  
  
"I like you liking it," Crowley breathed. "I like being kissed."  
  
"Oh, good. Then I'll kiss you some more."  
  
It seemed like thousands of them, peppered over his face, not indiscriminately but with great care and attention to detail. Here, in the shadow of his eyebrow, softer than the brush of a feather. There, at his hairline, nearly counting each hair it was so precise. More, measuring out the line of his jaw in lip-lengths, somehow building a portrait of Crowley out of himself, so that he could see the shape of the love Aziraphale was molding to him physically. Closer again to his mouth, even more gentle, nearly supplicant. Did he want to taste him?  
  
Crowley opened his mouth both to breathe at the thought and to let him.  
  
Aziraphale breathed with him, and kissed the edge of his mouth again. And then the middle. Crowley found he was grinning in a manner that would doubtless appear both abjectly uncool and inordinately soppy. He didn't care. He laughed into Aziraphale's mouth.  
  
Aziraphale laughed back, and kissed his teeth. And he touched him with his tongue. It was a radial of muscle? It set an anchor in Crowley.  
  
Having parts of Aziraphale's face inside his face was a little strange, perhaps stranger than having parts of Aziraphale's soul inside his soul, but it seemed nonetheless somehow fitting. New, but not bad. Crowley's hands went to the sides of Aziraphale's face and traced down them, feeling the give of his skin under light pressure and the movement beneath it.  
  
Aziraphale turned into his hand with eyes still closed, one way and then the other, breaking from his mouth and kissing his fingertips. Crowley shivered. Aziraphale took notice of that.  
  
"Ah, your hands," he said, and took one between his own, sitting up to press his lips nearly intangibly into Crowley's palm. Crowley squirmed, watching him. Aziraphale's grin glinted like candlelight off a knife in between his kisses, and he touched his lips to the tip of each finger in turn. Crowley hummed. This got him a harder, just barely wet kiss to the heel of his hand, which had an electric line to the hollow of his elbow, which twitched, and from there to his core. He gasped.  
  
"Aha," Aziraphale chuckled, deceptively mildly for such a bastard, and proceeded to take Crowley's whole first finger into his mouth.  
  
"Ooh," Crowley wiggled. Something was very strong there.  
  
His second finger was equally affected, and when Aziraphale sucked a great smacking snog into the inside of Crowley's wrist, there was a very small convulsion to contain.  
  
"Don't hold back for my sake," Aziraphale charged him. "I like to see if it's good for you."  
  
Crowley thought of how he watched Aziraphale eat, and resolved to overcome his expressive inhibitions. Aziraphale kissed his forearm with a drag of teeth, and Crowley bucked with a breathless grunt, regardless of any inhibitions he might have entertained initially.  
  
"Oh, I should have known better than to keep to subtlety." Aziraphale considered him, and the only thing saving his expression from gleeful malevolence was the sweetness he had made inherent to his face. "Here, let's have that off," he said, tugging at the sleeve of Crowley's shirt, and Crowley agreed.  
  
Crowley's enthusiasm overwhelmed his compunctions entirely, and, along with his shirt, all of his clothes made themselves scarce.  
  
"We're cheating now, are we?" Aziraphale followed suit, or lack thereof, and was only clothed in his smile, which was plenty becoming.  
  
"It's not cheating if we haven't ruled against it," Crowley lawyered.  
  
"The fun of this is that you get to learn the rules as you go," Aziraphale said. He had made his way just below Crowley's collarbone, and he set the elegant tips of his fingers against it, and then lowered his mouth.  
  
Crowley couldn't look at him anymore, and not just because he was coming too close to see. Crowley's eyes fluttered shut. "S-so, what rules have we learnt?"  
  
"I should properly be hearing them from you, but I'll give it a go," Aziraphale said into Crowley's chest, and then licked him. "Lips are good, little bit of teeth, fingers are sensitive, subtlety is overrated," he continued, and set his mouth against the stretch of Crowley's pectoral. He sucked, hard, and paused. "You're going to have a lot of hickeys, if you want them."  
  
"Ah, hm, yes, I do," said Crowley, pressing his eyelids closed as hard as he inhumanly could.  
  
Crowley had found that pressure against one's optic nerve, such as that produced by a nice firm, sustained rub of the eyes after a tiring day, resulted in a wash of colour and pattern that, while meaningless and uncontrollable, was also often beautiful and frequently engaging, if one took the time and attention to appreciate it. Similar efforts, when applied to other specific nerves—just as specialised but less technically complex—obtained results that definitively outclassed the optic reaction.  
  
Aziraphale's mouth had reached Crowley's hipbone, and his hands were sliding along the inside of Crowley's thigh and under his knee on the other side. Crowley had several conflicting impulses; his lungs and diaphragm almost wanted to sneeze, considering the short, sharp inhales that seemed the automatic response to the negative pressure of Aziraphale's kissing and the tickle of cool air over the wet trail Aziraphale was leaving down his abdomen. His spine wanted to curl, but it couldn't tell which direction, and his legs wanted both to splay out and to follow Aziraphale's hands at once. Crowley groaned.  
  
Yes?" Aziraphale asked, settling himself between Crowley's legs.  
  
The damp air of his question puffed over Crowley. It made his whole consciousness stutter. "Uh," he said. "The—um. Mm, yes."  
  
Aziraphale laid his hands over Crowley's sharp hipbones, and his mouth to the skin over Crowley's perfectly functional, highly specialised nerves.  
  
"_Fuck_," said Crowley, and sat straight up.  
  
"Mhm," said Aziraphale, right onto him, smoothing his hips with his thumbs. There was some kind of radial or anchor running between the hollows where Aziraphale's thumbs were, and the hot shuddery tangle at Crowley's diaphragm, and they both fastened to the increasingly distraught place where Aziraphale was kissing him, but when Crowley groped for the metaphysical lines with the corresponding parts of himself, he found nothing new, and nothing to hold fast against the sensory onslaught.  
  
"Augh," said Crowley, grabbing onto Aziraphale's hands, and flopped back down. "_Agh_."  
  
"I know, my love," Aziraphale chided. "Come on, now."  
  
Crowley was holding weakly to Aziraphale's wrists, and Aziraphale was rubbing smoothly up his belly with one hand, squeezing his hip with the other, deep rolls to the inside of his hipbone with the thumb, fingers sliding over the rise of muscle in the back. His mouth was both pulling at Crowley and driving over him, and the tiny prod of teeth here and there on the surface of his skin was as unendurable as the sight of Aziraphale lavishing unadulterated, singular devotion on Crowley. It just could not be borne.  
  
Crowley bore it, and he writhed.  
  
Aziraphale shoved peremptorily down on the hip he had a hold of, the tyrant, and slid his other hand out of Crowley's grip, down Crowley's thigh to pin him at the knee. Crowley had cultivated an interest in wrestling back in the Peloponnese, when it was the done thing, but the stakes had never seemed so high. He had to get out of this, but also he mustn't; he had to get more of it. His knee stayed where it was, and his hips curled into the lunging, engulfing greed Aziraphale had manifested between his legs.  
  
Civilizations could have arisen and declined. Or electrons could have hesitated in their frantic, cloudy orbits. Aziraphale wanted him, and had got him, and he was delirious from it. He could feel his toes, cold somehow, and his fingers, still clinging to Aziraphale, but they seemed alien compared to the hectic exertion of his blood in his face, down his front, to Aziraphale. It was very like a fever. It was like the only fever he'd ever had, rather, but it wasn't pain, despite being unbearable, and it wasn't _wrong_; he was breaking, but not being destroyed, or—no, he was _opening_.  
  
His back locked and curved into a good approximation of a load-bearing arch, and his knees hit the bed on either side. He was all the way open.  
  
Aziraphale hummed into him, a great deep petulant whine, and let his knee go. His hand seemed like an irrelevant extra stimulus, skating up the inside of Crowley's thigh, until it converged with the wet glide of his tongue, and two carefully, perfectly manicured fingertips _pressed_ against Crowley, curling in the complementary hyperbola to his spine's curve. There was nothing Crowley could do, or wanted to do; he was a frizzing, crackling shambles, inside and out, on every plane, and he needed it.  
  
"Please–" He didn't know what he was asking for.  
  
Aziraphale didn't answer him. Or he did; his hand on Crowley's hip turned up and threaded their fingers together; the fingers of his other hand pressed harder, and drove _into_ Crowley before turning and pulling, pulling him inside out–  
  
Crowley shrieked, and gurgled, and the phantasms in the dark of his eyelids burst as burning cars, breakers, tidal forces, nebular currents gravitated to Aziraphale's points of contact. It was too many directions at once, in the negligible space of his body; he imploded, and exploded, and focused and dissipated so thoroughly he was at Aziraphale's mercy entirely, a curlicue of matter and consciousness held together by two hands and a mouth. The reverberation incapacitated Crowley altogether.  
  
He remembered breathing. He lay, and he breathed, and Aziraphale laid his head on Crowley's thigh and worked an arm under his leg and stroked his shin. He calmed. He opened his eyes.  
  
He tried to speak, and had to swallow a hoarse exhaustion first. "Well, that _was_ fun," he said shakily.  
  
Aziraphale pointedly did not say _I told you so_.  
  
Crowley looked sluggishly down the bed at him. As expected, he was somehow both shy and smug, and Crowley loved him with all the inevitable objective truth and all the impetuous endorphins he had at his disposal. He pulled feebly at the hand still interlaced with Aziraphale's. The implicit command was obeyed, and Aziraphale climbed up next to him to lie face to face, his own tension unreleased, blood still hot and racing. The angel's throat was a blotchy red, and his face full of desperate colour, but his eyes were mild and his wet mouth was kind. He didn't ask for anything, and Crowley could tell he wasn't going to.  
  
Crowley cleared his throat again, and creaked, "What now?"  
  
"That was the end of my plan," Aziraphale admitted, somewhat unsteadily.  
  
"No contingency for reciprocation, then?"  
  
Aziraphale shook his head and the character of his flush shaded, incredibly, to the bashful. Crowley rolled his eyes.  
  
"You just worked me over like you'd been training for it for centuries—devoured me like a filet mignon—and _now_ you're shy about it? When I'm capable of speech and coordinated motion again?"  
  
At least he wasn't protesting or demurring politely, waffling or insisting _No, I couldn't possibly_. The sound of Crowley's voice apparently made it worse. Aziraphale closed his eyes and breathed erratically. "It was fun for me, too."  
  
"All right, you bastard, let me look at you." Crowley gathered his slowly-returning faculties and settled into his afterglow, which contrasted viciously against the frenzied intensity of Aziraphale's aura. Crowley was wrung out and lazy, but also magnetized to Aziraphale's hardly-muffled vibrating urgency. He could see the allure of instilling and then soothing such a state. It wasn't all in the aura, either—not even mainly. Aziraphale's tension was muscular, his flush was circulatory. The flares of fervid nervous activity were in response to something Crowley couldn't really discern, until he put a hand to the side of Aziraphale's neck and a tremor progressed out from where he touched. Crowley wasn't even _doing_ anything, and Aziraphale was reacting to him. It was thrilling, and moving, and baffling.  
  
Crowley investigated the smooth juncture of Aziraphale's torso to his shoulder, the delicate knob at the top, swanning out into the exquisite spline of muscle. The skin was velvet as the petals of a just-blushing peony. Aziraphale twitched under his touch, ticklish.  
  
Crowley stilled his hand. "Oh, Angel, you really _live_ in here, don't you?"  
  
"That's what we've got them for, don't you think?"  
  
Oh, it was. "Mm. Yeah. But you're much better at it than most." Crowley set his hand over the line of the trapezius, letting his fingers fan across it. He had been in more churches than just to rescue angels from Nazis, and had a look inside even more without stepping onto consecrated ground, and as he looked at his fingers over Aziraphale's shoulder he thought that together they resembled nothing so much as limestone fan vaults in the Gothic style.  
  
"We're a church together," he said obscurely, but Aziraphale seemed to understand him.  
  
"I've always thought so," came the choked reply.  
  
"Lie down properly," Crowley dictated, and kissed Aziraphale nearly drunkenly on the nose.  
  
Aziraphale rolled onto his back and trembled, eyes still shut, laid out like a condemned man, or one of Leonardo's anatomical studies, or an elegant buffet. Crowley drew his fingers down Aziraphale's chest, watching the tremble escalate as they caught on a nipple here, a hair there. He flattened his hand and added the other, framing the bottom of Aziraphale's ribcage, thinking of stars and dust and bones and breath. He firmed his touch and pressed as Aziraphale had pressed into him, pulling the skin and what was below it down, rubbing into Aziraphale's core. Was it vanity, or propriety, or habit, that Aziraphale maintained a navel? Crowley kneaded the low wall of muscle below it, between the hips. And he encountered another flushed, trembling, straining part of Aziraphale.  
  
"You keep these on all the time? What a lot of work! So diligent," Crowley admired.  
  
Aziraphale's face creased, and his jaw clenched visibly.  
  
"I still don't see any writing," Crowley teased.  
  
"_Ah_, you _fiend_," Aziraphale swore, and made it sound sacred, "it's all for you– I'm all for you–"  
  
"Guess I'd better take it, then," said Crowley, and encircled it with a solid grip. It was very mobile skin, sweltering and sticky over the rigidity inside, but delicate and plush as the finest silks of history. Crowley bent to look closer. He could see Aziraphale's heartbeat. It made him smile. On a fanciful whim, thinking of hearts and troths and constancy, he brushed a kiss to the tip.  
  
Aziraphale said nothing, but he sort of changed shape. His breath, which had been guttering in and out of him like a volatile fluid on the verge of combustion, exploded from him with a shockingly tiny noise. He twisted into himself, nearly kneeing Crowley in the shoulder, and collapsed like a dying star, with the same degree of exultant emanation. Crowley's hands, still gripping him at the middle and around the point of origin of all this ecstasy, were enfolded in the throes of Aziraphale's precipitous bliss, and he could feel the surges and undulations in Aziraphale's physical space as clearly as in his metaphysical one. He was exquisite in his rapture, and Crowley had caused it, even more by just being himself than by any skill or intention. Crowley let go of the middle and took hold of the edges of Aziraphale, crushing him by the shoulder and thigh to Crowley's body, heedless of the mess or the flailing.  
  
"You're so– I– _Aziraphale_," he prayed helplessly, hopefully, into the angel's neck. He felt at home.  
  
"Yes," concurred his beloved, embracing him in return. "Yes."  
  
  
  
  
  
1 "Nine times the Space that measures Day and Night / To mortal men, he with his horrid crew Lay vanquisht, rowling in the fiery Gulfe Confounded though immortal" were the lines, but honestly, the fiery Gulfe was the least of it. And the crew hadn't been all that horrid. Not then. Horrific, maybe, in their suffering. Horrible, in their appearance. He wasn't sure. That wasn't really what he remembered about the occasion.  
  
2 Despite his later importance on the worldwide stage and his contribution to understandings that eventually had consequences only nearly averted by the witch's young man's stunning technological ineptitude, Crowley had not kept track of the bright young Swiss man after their mildly entertaining conversations in the Federal Office for Intellectual Property, and was unaware that his nationality was later Austrian, before it eventually settled at American.  
  
3 Namely, important developments in his adversarial progress. Or retreat. Or, er, stasis. Torpor? No, that was for wintertime. Standing. Status. Status quo. Yes. Adversarial status quo. Even, eventually, a bit of quid pro quo. Maybe not as much as he'd like. But there was time enough for that. Now, there would be. Yes.  
  
4 And a significant number of scales inconceivable even by noncorporeal metaphysical beings like angels, or demons, who experienced them. It galled Crowley to admit Ineffability, even to himself, but as with many thoughts and concepts he associated with Aziraphale, he couldn't really dismiss it entirely, or even compartmentalise properly. It was true: he'd been there, and it had happened to him. He had felt it, known it, and he still couldn't figure it out or articulate it. Divine Ineffability and Infernal Atopy weren't mutually exclusive.  
  
5 In at least one documented case. Crowley had been there; he'd seen the crucifixion. He sympathised. In point of fact, he empathised. People (and other beings) had been asking for an explanation for being Forsaken for a long time before this one. It was a shame even this exceptional case didn't get an answer. Or, maybe—Crowley thought—deciding _that_ was the proper application of shame (to answerlessness) was one of the reasons he'd been sauntering anyway.  
  
  
6 It was more like an anxious particle collider than a train, which made it somewhat more difficult to control, even for a demon, who ought to be used to it.  
  
7 The Buggre Alle This Bible of 1651 was his favourite, Crowley knew.  
  
8 Crowley was familiar with both ends of the spectrum not only personally and professionally, but academically. He had spent awhile in the sixteenth century teaching moral philosophy (and, inevitably, botany) to whichever demon-conjuring cults had bothered Aziraphale persistently enough to borrow his really effective grimoires. His time as the 10th Spirit Buer, more informally known as Professor Lionwheel, had been a well-deserved hoot between long and unproductive wile sessions. Hell had given him honourary command of some outrageous number of imp legions for that, just on the principle of persistent interference.  
  
9 Crowley raised his eyebrows, furrowing his brow and slitting his eyelids reflexively to protect his already-thin pupils, but the receptors were all blown out anyway, and he was not currently seeing with his corporation's ocular equipment, so it didn't do him any good.  
  
10 He had the vague thought that he should get the paperwork together for this, since it's always better to have formal records on changes of status and allegiance, but it was a mental note for the future. This was just as well, since Aziraphale in his current state might not have been able to withstand the elation if Crowley had externalised the idea.  
  
11 Not literally. Crowley was not, after all, up for hitting kids, and Aziraphale wouldn't.  
  
12 The Blue Fairy Book, though a first edition, wasn't one of the horrendously expensive titles in Aziraphale's collection, and though Aziraphale had taken a personal liking to Andrew Lang when he'd interviewed the angel for one of the books he'd written on myth and religion, Aziraphale didn't have any special attachment to the fairytale compilations, and he didn't have the whole set, nor were they signed.  
  
13 https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Blue_Fairy_Book/The_Bronze_Ring  
  
14 They were melodies Crowley would have been entirely ready to believe were divinely inspired, except that he had known the composer. That one hadn't needed any help.  
  
15 https://soundcloud.com/rionsanura/chichester-psalms-mvt-3  
  
16 Crowley made himself a mental note to file the paperwork for the pun as well, in case Hell hadn't caught wind of it in the last few centuries and he could still get the credit.  
  
17 Unfortunate for Crowley. Very fortunate indeed for its deployer.


End file.
